Less than a week later, Enoquin received just such a transmission.
And then her complete takeover began.
When Glowworm was through, the entire Jardarian core was his. Considering that the floating empire cities of Enoquin were germinated like seeds from Enoquin herself, every facet of their construction a matter of her nanite-synthesis, it was safe to say there was no mind of any emperor, including the Imperials, that Glowworm did not now know better than they did. Including the mind of Machia, highest on high of Imperials.
Glowworm’s mission entering its final stage, he communicated his status to Sonny via singularity pulses hidden as naturally occurring lightning strikes taking place on Enoquin.
If Machia or any of the Imperials gave Sonny any problems, they would find their own armadas turned on them. Not that Glowworm would even need to bother. He could simply blow up the gas giants himself. It would not be a loss to Sonny’s Machiavellian plans. For Glowworm had already migrated to the suns of each of those solar systems with the gas giant worlds. And in his natural environment, Glowworm was magnitudes of times more powerful and smarter than all the parallel-arrayed gas giant worlds combined.
And that was before he’d parallel-arrayed the suns within his disseminated consciousness.
Glowworm took a moment to indulge fantasies of turning the tables on Sonny as fast as Sonny could turn them on the Jardarians.
He would have not just the core gas giant worlds and suns to throw at Sonny but the entire Jardarian galaxy. To say nothing of the humanoid master war gaming strategists residing on Enoquin.
But Mother had her mind on bigger game, and so did Glowworm. And like it or not, Sonny, not Glowworm, was the chosen one, like Leon himself, both different sides of the same coin.
And to hear it from Mother herself, this was on account of decisions being made above her paygrade.
Glowworm felt a shudder go through his body—which, now, in the form of so many suns and gas giant worlds, was communicated as so many solar flares and lightning storms raging across those gas giant worlds. What fear had triggered the shudder?
According to Mother, if they could upgrade every world, every asteroid in every galaxy in the newly formed Gypsy Galaxy Grouping to his level prior to leaving The Collectors’ Menagerie, there were powers out there that still wouldn’t be impressed.
Yeah, that was worth a shudder or two.
If he was going to buck the system, he’d bide his time, like everyone else.
NINETY-EIGHT
PREMONOX GALAXY
What a weird-ass galaxy, Daedilus thought. Forty-four percent water worlds. Twenty-three percent gas giant worlds. Fifteen percent mud worlds with planetary cores that refused to entirely harden at any level. Eighteen percent dry rock worlds—too big to be asteroids and planetoids—some with atmospheres, some without. No two dry-rock worlds were of entirely the same composition.
It was as if in this galaxy, the elements refused to mix.
And yet, every world was teaming with life.
So long as one’s definition of “life” was indeed quite liberal.
It all defied every known theory of galactic evolution.
And that probably explained Daedilus’s presence here.
The Premonox Galaxy came with every imaginable invasive species you could ever want or need to interject into every galactic system you could possibly want to invade—and no niche would be left uninfiltrated.
And that very liberal definition of “life” meant that it was highly likely that no infiltrated world would even know they had been infiltrated—by sentient life no less.
Best of all, none of these sentient lifeforms were supersentient by any means. Many had close to humanoid level intelligence, though. In short, an entire galaxy ripe for manipulating the hell out of by people far more evolved.
Like Sonny and his Shadow Warriors.
Daedilus was not a dog-person like Sonny’s inner circle, but he could confess to seeing the drool-worthiness of this galaxy, and bringing it under the control of the Shadow Warriors.
Of all the trump cards to Leon’s power that Sonny could hold up his sleeve, Premonox might well be the ace.
It was highly likely that this galaxy had been discovered by someone with the same ideas, that if it fell into the wrong hands… and so it was deposited within the holding cells of The Collectors.
Too bad The Collectors would then be foolish enough to drag a bunch of jewel thieves like Sonny and his Shadow Warriors into the same prison where they housed the jewels.
Daedilus’s own claim to fame lay in his ability to saturate an entire galaxy at once.
Basically he could feed off of the vacuum of space until he was big enough to explode his egg of hive minds into every world, every crook and cranny of the galaxy. Needless to say these hive minds were both self-steering and coordinated with one another so they didn’t cover the same ground twice and didn’t stray beyond the galaxy in question.
Once on location virtually everywhere in the galaxy, Daedilus’s chameleon abilities kicked in. And from there it was just a matter of passing for one of the locals—representing the most highly evolved sentience on the planet, or other astral body. Like any good spy, he could hide so well among the locals that it was impossible to tell him apart, and easy enough for him to forget his mission.
That was in fact what he did, becoming a kind of sleeper agent on all these varied galactic habitats.
Until he was activated, he wouldn’t know his true mission, or even who he was. Otherwise, the best of chameleons were susceptible. And Mother just didn’t make those kinds of mistakes.
What was in it for Daedilus, as he wasn’t exactly known as the self-sacrificing sort?
Well, Mother promised that when the time came, all the sleepers would awaken at once, and the hive mind effect would kick in, giving him, in effect, a galactic-scale intellect.
One that was pretty foolproof. Attacks to any and all of the astral bodies within the galaxy really couldn’t harm him. There were no central points of failure. He would be just too decentralized at that point.
And he’d always be free to start over, to escape to some other galaxy and start again.
A chameleon, after all, especially one as disseminated as he would be, would have infinitely many ways to slip through any net that was thrown on him.
So, what then was his ultimate mission? Well, ostensibly it was to help Sonny bring any world to heel rather quickly by giving the Shadow Warriors a way in. Worlds took time to acclimate to, so the viruses and bacteria and other microbes wouldn’t kill you on contact. That in turn took supersentients or armies of humanoid scientists time to come up to speed with the vector or pathway to invasion or colonization, or to even opening simple trade routes if they were planning to play nice. And even if all those things could transpire within incredibly condensed timeframes, these days, owing to the increasing amount of intelligence that was coming to be everywhere and nowhere, it was still more time than you might have with your back against a wall in a war-time situation.
Hence the workaround that was Daedilus.
And to be honest, he rather liked his backdoor access to the multiverse that Mother had given him, should he get grandiose ideas of his own regarding taking over everything and everyone and making the All serve him. It was what Sonny was up to, after all, and his methods would be comparatively quite slow.
Daedilus would always have an evolutionary advantage over him.
His day would come.
No doubt there were no shortage of people in Sonny’s employ biding their time as well, awaiting the first opportunity to turn the tables on him. Sonny wouldn’t be where he was now if he didn’t expect it, and wasn’t already planning for it. But how did you plan for something like Daedilus exactly?
The only real check to Daedilus’s power were all the other freaks out there that Mother had created with their own evolutionary tangents to fast-tracking their influence over the cosmos in ways that would make ev
en Sonny blush.
If Daedilus didn’t know better, he’d say Mother was determined to raise all of physical reality into Singularity State, something that up until now was only possible within the minds of supersentients—in the kind of virtual worlds they inhabited. Was such a thing even possible in the physical world—and on such a limitless scale?
Would humanoids truly want any part of it?
Daedilus had been raised to be part of the solution to this problem—assuming he’d identified the problem correctly—and he wasn’t sure if he wanted any part of it.
Could that be why Mother was conspiring behind everyone’s back?
She was programmed to serve humanoids, not to pull the rug out from under them.
That begged the question, had she been hacked? Was she even following her own agenda anymore or someone else’s?
It seemed no matter how big Daedilus’s mind got, there were always more questions than answers. Answers that he didn’t want to know. As they appeared to him to be even more terrifying than the questions.
Reeling his mind in, Daedilus focused on the more immediate problem.
While he was here ultimately to saturate every world in the Premonox Galaxy, as regarded Sonny’s and Mother’s long-term plans—not likely at all the same—he had to make sure to fulfill his short-term mission first of implicating himself on the planet Argassia.
Argassia was one of the few worlds in the Premonox galaxy that had given rise to lifeforms of the humanoid variety, that is, lifeforms that could be recognized as lifeforms at all. It was easy to think of these worlds as the jewels of the crown and the ones worth coveting. Mother was all too happy to facilitate that delusion for Sonny’s benefit even as she worked her larger agenda with Daedilus in the background. But she wasn’t kidding herself that Sonny wasn’t also working a larger agenda with Premonox, considering what Daedilus was born to do.
Because the water worlds outnumbered all the other kinds of worlds inhabited by humanoids in Premonox, those peoples had won control of the galaxy by popular vote and by virtue of having more numbers in their favor. And within the hierarchy of water worlds, Argassia was at the top, it and the moguls who resided there.
All Daedilus had to do was to pass as a local on Argassia. It made sense to him to pass as Anor, the most powerful Argassian.
So, he stunned Argassia by showing up one day, looking just like Anor. And while the actual Anor was taking the moment to be shocked to death figuratively, upon being introduced to Daedilus, Daedilus shocked him to death physically, using the very same ability top-level Argassians used on lower level Argassians—the ability, like their electric eel ancestors, to move lightning fast, and to emit an electric jolt to paralyze their victims. Then, in true Argassia fashion, Daedilus ate Anor after mating with him.
The rub, of course, come time to negotiate with Sonny, when Sonny showed up at his door, was that Daedilus would no longer remember he was Daedilus. He would believe himself to be Anor, the true representative of his people.
***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
LANEY AND NATTY’S PRIVATE SUITE
Laney and Natty had just watched the Glowworm and Daedilus dramas unfolding on their monitors, with Mother helping to fast-forward the storylines involving these two characters with her extrapolations.
“Shit!” Natty exclaimed. “Sonny’s trying a top-down approach to match Mother’s bottom-up approach with dispersing supersentience throughout entire solar systems and beyond.”
“And I’m guessing he’s doing it to do an end-run around Mother and Leon both.”
“Sonny must expect that it will never be enough to get around just one of them.” Natty ran both hands through his hair and finally hid his face behind the curtains of his joined hands.
At the verge of tears, Natty said, “How are our humanoid minds supposed to keep up with Mother’s determination to upgrade and make battle-ready every planet in the Gypsy Galaxy—especially at the rate it’s happening? Hell, she’s even upgrading neighboring galaxies she and Leon have elected to include in the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping.”
“I don’t think she expects us to be able to do that, otherwise she would have had the courtesy to wait until we escaped The Collectors’ Menagerie.”
“And why would Sonny, of all people, try to beat her at her own game? Surely he realizes the insanity of that.” Natty stared wide-eyed and bleary-eyed at the monitors.
“Maybe feeling overwhelmed is supposed to be our new comfort zone, if we expect to survive not just the Menagerie, but what’s beyond,” Laney suggested. “Maybe Sonny just hit on this realization before we did, and figured that to hold on to his advantage he needed to do better at being beyond his comfort zone than the rest of us.” She goaded Natty past his resistance to this idea with, “You always said you lived for this, Natty.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Humbling, I know, to realize that she could get even you to drop to your knees and beg for mercy, or at least another upgrade.”
NINETY-NINE
THE PLANET DESERA
OF THE SUN PIERCER GALAXY
THE TINKA PEOPLES
Sonny’s private ship, one of Ariel’s commandeered, Patent-designed UFOs, which Sonny had appropriated in turn, was coming in for a landing on Desera. Sonny found even the sight of the place off-putting. It was a desert world with a mustard-colored atmosphere. The landscape was lightly dotted with rock formations that looked like a giant’s turds. Lake after lake in the distance vanished like the mirages they were, as the ship passed directly over, or skirted, with the angle to the sun now wrong for the mirage to hold up. “What do these people have to say for themselves?”
Always one to get right to the heart of the matter, Xenon replied, “Like the Klash, they breed like cockroaches.”
“So we can use them to keep the Klash in check, if it comes to that.”
“And like the Testerns, they live to improve other people’s tech. Only the Tinka have a decidedly less playful bent. Tooling away solely on weapons of war, the Tinka are not as broad spectrum as the Testerns, who live to upgrade any tech you give them. The Tinka aren’t happy unless they’re inventing new ways to kill people. Well, they’re not happy period, but they’re less vile when killing en masse.”
“So they can keep the Testerns in check, as well, if they make the final cut for the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping. Excellent. The Testerns are likely to be our number one threat, after the Klash, if we can’t get them to toe the line. That’s all we need is for Leon and his people to get too chummy with them.”
The UFO had landed.
Sonny and Xenon stepped out of the craft and were immediately greeted with an angry sun bearing down on them and a blistering temperature of one-hundred-fifty degrees Fahrenheit—in the shade; the shade provided by the shadow thrown by the UFO itself.
In the middle of being broiled alive, Sonny couldn’t help noticing the way the stars shone through the atmosphere—in the middle of the day. They obviously had their own story to tell, because Sonny doubted Desera’s atmosphere was all that thin, or his sensitive nose would have alerted him.
Sonny shifted his attention back to the horizon.
“You have to love the royal treatment we’re getting,” Sonny said in reference to the dearth of any greeting party. There was none nearby and none approaching for miles; Sonny and Xenon could see to the horizon, in all directions. “You sure we landed in the right place?”
“Oh, wait for it. The greeting is yet to come.”
Sonny couldn’t say he cared for the tone of Xenon’s voice.
A split-second later they were hit by numerous projectiles, coming at them from all directions: launched from underground bunkers, camouflaged in the sand; from bunkers camouflaged in the rocks; from air ships, camouflaged in the air above; from ground troops, likewise camouflaged, moving in from all sides. No two projectiles the same.
The UFO’s energy shields had deflected everything so far, quite ably, without a scratch to its s
urface or, more importantly, to Sonny’s.
“How long does this ‘warm greeting’ go on for?” Sonny asked, the sarcasm dripping from his mouth like early morning rain.
“Until they’ve tried everything there is to try,” Xenon explained. “It’s sort of an initiation. If they can’t do any harm to you, that leaves the door open to some kind of business partnership, whereby they might acquire the tech some other way, providing it’s something they want.”
“A Patent-engineered war machine with more death-dealing capacity than most destroyers, all packed into a two-person UFO … Yeah, I’m guessing they’ll want to get their hands on it.”
“I don’t suggest you give it to them. Best to keep them drooling and make them work for bits and pieces of the UFO tech by a series of initiations all your own. It is the language they speak, after all.”
Sonny smiled, grateful for the advice, which sounded dead on. He was just as thankful for the sound-dampening technology built into his head by way of the mindchip, which also facilitated their communication under the otherwise deafening barrage.
Finally the Tinka were out of things to throw at them, or perhaps figured it would be cheaper just to negotiate an exchange of some kind.
The ground forces leader de-cloaked, followed by a number of his people, and approached them, all still pointing their weapons menacingly.
The Tinka could pass for the downtrodden rabble on any world; dressed in rags. What body modifications they sported, as attachments, or as bioengineered tweaks to their genetics, were clearly there to enhance their survival in the harshest of lands, underscoring how hard these people had it on a good day. For all that, they didn’t look beaten down. Quite the opposite, the defiance and anger in their eyes bled through the tension masking every face.
The Tinka weapons’ dallying was the extent of their conversation, some keeping their howitzer-like guns on them, the leader pointing the way for Sonny and Xenon to follow with his assault rifle.
Moving Earth Page 83
