Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “Every cell in their bodies becomes a stem cell that can generate a unique lifeform,” Leon said, extrapolating for himself from the intel that he’d gotten on Sonny’s encounter with the Klash, watching their soldiers battle in the Hall of Duels. “They can propagate their soldiers with any body-morphs necessary to occupy any world they get a foothold on.”

  “You see why I haunt you now even when you’re awake. I can’t afford to wait anymore for you to sleep and dream to pass on intel.”

  Leon smiled at him, grateful for his guidance as always. The shaman drew strength from a mountain in the Amazon fed by tremendous amounts of chi energy flowing through the planet. It facilitated his altered states and his ability to thought project even out here, perhaps to enter other realities as well. While this was all the typical work of shamans, Leon suspected he was something more. Any shaman he’d read about… well, this guy, if he was endemic to Earth, was definitely the prodigy of the lot. Local folklore throughout the region of the Amazon believed them to be Vikings abandoned by invaders from many thousands of years past. Though stories and legends of all kinds abounded about them.

  “I see you’ve graduated beyond broken English,” Leon said.

  “It was important then to maintain the sham. But you’ve grown up now, quite a bit in a short while. Though good luck keeping up with this one,” he said, panning his head to Cassandra. “You will know when the time is right,” he said to her, soothingly, reassuringly, realizing she was chomping at the bit. Cassandra was not one to be restrained. It usually took Solo and one of his ten-dimensional energy fields and a supersentience to manage it even for a short while. As to self-restraint, the word was formerly missing from her vocabulary entirely. In her defense, she was holding herself in check better than normal.

  “You have anything else for us?” Leon asked, seeing the avatar fading, the White Indian losing his ability to hold on to the thought projection, possibly because the chi energy flowing through the mountain upon which he meditated on Earth was experiencing a diminishing flow of chi—the flow itself affected to varying degrees by everything going on in the multiverse.

  “Just this. Trust your gut,” he said to Leon. “When the time comes to make the most heinous decision you have ever made.”

  And with that, his aborigine friend faded from view.

  Leon’s Omega Force was glaring at Cassandra, their weapons pointed at her, another spinal cord reflex their higher brains hadn’t bothered to intercede on, or they’d have realized how impotent the move was.

  “Excuse me,” DeWitt said, “but did he say she could eradicate billions of these probes on billions of planets at once, without leaving this spot? Not even Mother can do that.”

  Leon sighed.

  “You haven’t thought it through,” Crumley said to Ajax. “You heard our White Indian friend. She’d also have to figure out how to eradicate all Klash soldiers on each of those worlds—every last cell, mind you, of their bodies. Doesn’t matter if there are a dozen of the soldiers on each world or if they’ve grown and mutated into millions per world… Enact all that genocide, mind you, without disturbing the planet’s natural ecosystem, and bothering the Gaia consciousness on each world, who will be only too happy to have the invasive species sterilized.”

  Leon groaned. “You’re not helping, Crumley.”

  “I wasn’t meaning to,” he said, glaring at Cassandra like another hostile native.

  Cassandra was not rising to the bait. More points in her favor. Though Leon suspected she had the same misgivings about her own abilities and was secretly two steps ahead of them with the self-flagellation, which Leon couldn’t have either. He needed her powering up as quickly as possible.

  “Look, I may as well come clean,” Leon said. “You deserve to know. Cassandra was genetically created with the guidance and input of one of The Guardian species, the Umbrage, to be more precise. Perhaps specifically by Solo.”

  “We thought Natty was responsible for the genetic abomination that she is,” Cronos said, not surprisingly speaking with all the sound and fury and righteous indignation of the religious-minded.

  “I don’t yet have the whole story, and neither does Cassandra. You can bet I’ll be extracting it from Solo at the first opportunity.”

  “So, what is she then?”

  Crumley jumped the gun before Leon could get off the starting block. “The next generation on line,” Crumley said acidly, his eyes having never left her this entire time. “To do what is asked of her, she would have to be more powerful than an impregnated Blue Umbrage—believed to be the most powerful biological weapon in all creation, if the rumor mill and Mother’s downloads to our mindchips of breaking intel gathered from The Collectors’ Menagerie of galaxies, and dispersed on a need to know basis, is worth anything.”

  “I guess we should feel privileged Mother included us in the need-to-know list,” DeWitt said, collapsing from his crouched position on two legs back on his ass entirely, using his assault rifle now more like an old man uses a cane, to keep him from collapsing the rest of the way. “This is why Crumley has taken charge of the unit in your absence, by the way,” he said to Leon, still speaking like someone giving an enervated, death bed confession. “I had hoped it would be me. It was me Leon was grooming, after all. But Crumley’s mind is a lot bigger than mine, and you need a mind like that where we’re going.”

  “Not big enough, apparently,” Crumley said, still glaring at Cassandra and coloring his tone with just enough acid to pass himself off as a spitting mamba.

  “I think a little appreciation might be in order,” Leon said. “If she can’t regenerate fast enough and often enough, we’ll never recapture the Gypsy Galaxy. And this early in her unfolding…”

  All eyes turned to him, the fires burning inside them erupting. Yeah, maybe Leon should have kept that part out of it. He continued undaunted. “I can guarantee you, she can’t yet regenerate readily, so we’re a long way from being out of the woods. This is still an all hands on deck situation. It will take all of us working together if we’re to stand a chance, each of us not just doing our part, but finding some way of reaching beyond ourselves. The Mars war gods will have factored that ability each of us has to surpass ourselves in times of crisis into their thinking, to minimize on computing time they have to dedicate to smaller matters, or events happening at the clock speeds in which human minds can best process.”

  The pep talk seemed to be working. Their eyes were looking less glazed over, a sense of self-importance returning.

  “And in case you were wondering why you were beamed here at all, if the team hadn’t found that device and put two and two together, Cassandra wouldn’t have known to come here. We’re all her eyes and ears now, processing information she can then tap for knowing how best to deploy herself on the battlefield. We serve a similar function vis-à-vis Mother, and Mother has been known to go off-line before. So, again, it’s one more piece of insurance in a multiverse in which you can never buy enough of it.”

  “All right, Leon. Enough. Any more pep talk and we’ll be forced to recognize our lack of whining is no longer what separates us from Alpha Unit,” DeWitt said.

  Leon turned to Cassandra. “Might be a good idea for Omega Force to get their hands on the device that’s here. Feel free to destroy all the others. But we could use this technology ourselves if Mother’s bioprinters ever go down again. Even if they don’t, they could be freed up for other uses. And if we can find a way to send these probes into each ship of an invading space fleet, we can disseminate more saboteurs than Mother could possibly hemorrhage out of all her bioprinters at once.”

  “Just one problem,” Cassandra said. “It’s built with rare-earth elements we’ve yet to identify. Replicating it will not be easy, assuming its materials can even be coerced into teleporting and passing invisibly through a ship’s shields.”

  Leon sighed. “One impossible task at a time, Cassandra. Speaking of which, how are you feeling?”

  She smil
ed. There was no humor in the smile. It looked more like she was channeling her rageaholic disposition in a far more surgical fashion these days. In other words, despite her extraordinary abilities, this woman didn’t exactly have the steepest learning curve. All the same, she’d have to let go of those toxic feelings to work her wonders. Let’s hope she was up to the task yet again.

  She showed the whites of her eyes.

  The rest of the team took a step back. Some took two. Another impotent act triggered by a spinal-cord reflex that was connected to the most primitive parts of their brains. Maybe Leon had remained where he was because he was becoming soft. Spending too much time in thinking mode may well be slowing his warrior’s reflexes.

  Her eyes cleared moments later. “It’s done.” Her expression was more neutral this time, though it may have been tinged with a trace of sadness. Had she reacted in a human fashion to that kind of wholesale genocide? That would be a first. She usually gave sociopaths a good name. But she could just have been saddened by her inability to feel anything over what she just did.

  Leon thought about the zone of centered calm she needed to do to perform this magic, which had formerly been inaccessible to her, prior to Leon’s ongoing psyops campaign unleashed on her mind to help humanize her, and unburden her of the karmic mistakes of her past as much as of Natty’s, and possibly of The Guardians themselves. Was she truly accessing the Godhead directly during these times when she was able to get her own ego out of the way? Or did the altered brainwaves instead allow The Guardian races—Leon had to remind himself that as time went on they were discovering more and more of them, not just Solo’s species…The Zalics crystals for instance—to sign off on her pulling the trigger, granting her the power to do so?

  It was a question for a time when things slowed down enough for him to possibly throw the deep thinking necessary at the issue.

  “Looks like we’re out of here,” Leon said. He turned to Cassandra. “Let’s have Mother decide where we’re headed next. You could use a rest, and that includes from the rest of the fires you sense that only you can put out. Let Omega Force carry you for a while.”

  “But…” Cassandra protested, her temper flaring.

  “I know.” Leon sighed. “We risk losing the Gypsy Galaxy as a whole, and at the very least, the prison escape failing. Sometimes the smaller pieces have to do what they can to protect the queen on the chessboard. Until her time has come to make her move.”

  She hissed like a Blue. “That’s…”

  “The way it’ll have to be. It’s time for us to let the fourth brain, as Natty would say, do its work. Mother and the Mars war gods she has spawned are part of that coalition, and will help us all to pick up the slack by ensuring we are where we need to be when we need to be.”

  She emitted a primal scream that Leon thought would level the forest.

  It was nice to know the more things change… the more the old Cassandra remained the old Cassandra. Definitely more Blue Umbrage in her than any other color. But perhaps, this early in her unfolding, she’d accessed the Blue Umbrage influence in her gene mix because the Blues, with zero tolerance for anyone compromising the safety of the peoples in their charge, was just the part of herself she was psychically more in tune with. The explosive rage the Blues were capable of…Leon would have to work on that.

  ONE HUNDRED FIVE

  THE GYPSY GALAXY

  THE PLANET TRUIL

  Omega Force, with the diminished Cassandra in tow, materialized, courtesy of Mother and her Mars war god deploying them where they could have the most effect, on Truil. They had received the briefing in transit, and the necessary downloads to their mindchips, so they could hit the ground running.

  A good thing, as they were taking fire even before they finished materializing.

  Cassandra, though weakened from singlehandedly repelling a Klash ground forces invasion of the Gypsy Galaxy of over two billion planets, still had no trouble throwing an energy shield around them long enough to push back their attackers.

  They’d walked into an ambush.

  But how? How could anyone but Mother and her Mars war god possibly know where they were deploying?

  The Klash might just have one more piece of technology Omega Force would have to get their hands on, Leon thought. And that might be why Mother beamed them here. The Klash Emitter was already in Mother’s and the Mars war god’s possession, beamed aboard the Nautilus for one or the other to decide on the best and fastest route for deploying it.

  Crumley reached into his waist pouch and pulled out what looked like an old-fashioned grenade, circa World War II, back when “world wars” were the most amount of insanity humanoids could direct at one another.

  He hurled it as far as he could, and glared at Cassandra for good measure, no doubt communicating mindchip to mindchip.

  “Was that thing a dud?” DeWitt asked.

  “Why do you sound surprised?” Ajax cut in. “Who brings World War II tech to a TGC encounter? It’s like throwing sand in the face of a laser cannon.”

  “Is it me or are they no longer shooting at us?” Cronos made the sign of the cross over himself. “Saints be praised.”

  “Saints? Guardian angels? You really know how to go whole hog with the religious revival thing,” Ajax sniped.

  Crumley explained, “It was an acoustic grenade, keyed to disrupt every cell in their bodies, make them all go their separate ways. Blast radius of a few miles. Should give us some breathing room before they can close the net again. It’s why I had to have Cassandra tweak her energy shield, and, for the ones seated in the cheap seats, why you couldn’t hear anything.”

  “You can’t pretend God wasn’t part of the equation,” Cronos insisted, driving his flaming crucifix into the ground and leaning on it like a walking staff, as immune to the flames as ever.

  By this point no one was taking him on. Why waste the mind power?

  “Come on,” Leon said. “We need to find whatever the hell device they used to know we were coming before we did. Crumley, you want to run point? This is more your specialty.”

  “Think I will,” Crumley said, getting off his knee. He stood and turned three-hundred sixty degrees about on himself. “This way,” he said, pointing.

  “Why?” DeWitt bitched, frustrated as always that he didn’t understand the big picture, since that was technically his job as second in command. Leon had given him the position mostly because DeWitt was desperate to prove to his son that he could aspire to being more than just another order taker. No one really took DeWitt seriously in that position, as the team had no hard and fast leadership hierarchy. He with the best idea always won the vote. Sometimes, to everyone’s surprise, that was DeWitt.

  “I have no idea,” Crumley confessed. “But sometimes you have to be lost before you can be found.”

  “Hear, hear,” Cronos sounded off, hiking behind Crumley with his flaming cross. It was a wonder it wasn’t setting the forest afire around them. But no one could deny the preternatural wonders of that flame. No doubt the nanite hive minds inside the cross bordered on a kind of supersentience, however humble in scale.

  Omega Force was marching more or less single file, so it didn’t take long for Ajax to pipe up with his equivalent of a marching to the rhythm tune, in his case, his jokes delivered to set the pace.

  “During a long road trip,” Ajax said, “what did the zombie son ask his zombie father from the back seat of their car? ‘Hey dad, are we dead yet?’”

  Leon glanced back at Cassandra bringing up the rear in time to see her roll her eyes and clench down on her jaw. Leon took her by the hand and walked side by side with her as she took a deep breath to keep her head from exploding. Leon had to admit, that for all the steam coming out her ears over the annoying banter she was about to suffer, Cassandra was relaxing into the situation. Honestly, the more moronic the chitchat the better. Their sixth senses had been honed enough from countless prior battles to snap them back to high alert as needed. And if it was at a
ll delayed kicking in, there was always Cassandra, never late on arriving on cue come time to kill somebody.

  Ajax, on a roll now, piped up with, “Two aliens landed their spacecraft in a creek next to a rural farm. They disembarked the saucer, getting themselves soaked from the muddy water.

  “The first person the aliens saw was a ten year old boy fishing close by. The aliens said, ‘We want to see your leader but we don’t know what to expect?’

  “The boy replied, ‘Well, I suspect you’ll get grounded for two weeks for tracking mud in the house.’”

  Leon smiled weakly at the joke, thinking about why Mother had dispatched them here. This one Premonition device alone, which could anticipate troops deploying before they arrived on scene, which Omega Force was here to retrieve could neutralize Mother’s bioprinters responsible for the clone teams. Perhaps that was why her bioprinters were down on the Nautilus. They hadn’t failed from sabotage, but from hemorrhaging clones just trying to stay ahead of the Klash learning curve. She would have stopped if none of the clone teams were getting through, meaning the Klash hadn’t deployed this tool far and wide yet, possibly owing to the limits of their own computer printers.

  Leon had been reading sci-fi since he was a kid; he figured that as much as anything explained his ability to cope with his new reality. In at least one of those stories, when faced with a similar situation, the physicist friend of the story’s hero suggested that tachyons were to blame. He suggested that teleporters or ships’ transporters might affect tachyons somehow in a way readable to a civilization with the right tech, which would cue them even before a team’s arrival that they were coming. Leon was no physicist but…

  “No, it’s something else,” Cassandra said, popping into his head. Maybe she figured it was a safer place to be than being forced to listen to Ajax’s stress-reducing prattle. He was Omega Forces’ equivalent of Skyhawk, at his best in low stress situations, ironically. In Ajax’s case, he artificially lowered the stress level around him with his jokes. He was interceding on Cassandra’s and Leon’s mindchip-to-mindchip communication even now.