Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “A hesitant driver,” Ajax said, “waiting for a traffic jam to clear, came to a complete stop on the freeway ramp. The traffic thinned, but the driver still waited. Finally a furious voice from the vehicle behind him cried, ‘The sign says Yield, not Give Up!’”

  Leon heard the rest of the team chuckling, though with the link to Cassandra’s mind engaged, they sounded a million miles away, and he noticed also that they were indeed making quicker time through the jungle, even if they still didn’t know where the hell they were heading.

  “Does Crumley realize he has been genetically modified by Mother?” Cassandra asked in Leon’s head, evidently completing some scan on him to justify following the buffoon—from her perspective—a moment longer.

  “What?!”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘No’ since you didn’t even know.” She sighed in his head.

  “He must have been freaked out about his diminishing value-add as the canvas we fight on continues to expand in size. He used to be our quartermaster, tasked with finding us anything we needed to survive a situation that we didn’t think to bring with us.”

  “This ability of his to locate things” Cassandra advised, “is no longer limited to any geographic region, let alone one world. He is underestimating his gift—at least in its augmented form, which means…”

  “He’s an underutilized asset. I’ll find a way to break it to him. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to know. Like you, he just can’t believe he’s all that awesome. Or that his prayers might be answered by the closest thing we have to a god in our world, a supersentience.”

  “I’ll tell him. We don’t have time for you to figure out how to make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”

  “Cassandra!”

  But it was too late. “Hey, Dufus!” she blurted, throwing her voice at Crumley, marching at the front of the line, like an arrow hurled at the back of his head. Even with the vague sound cue, he stopped dead in his tracks and pivoted toward her.

  “Mother genetically upgraded you, just neglected to tell you. You can find your precious gifts for Omega Force to stay on the move, anywhere in the Gypsy Galaxy. It’s possible, if we ever escape the Menagerie that your range is limitless.”

  “Yeah, right.” Crumley turned around and continued his marching.

  Leon tightened his grip on Cassandra’s hand to keep her from jumping out of her skin just to strangle him. His inability to accept the truth now had consequences so far reaching she was actually justified in being this incensed, but she was likely also getting a taste of what her own inability to accept her full potential was costing them.

  “She can’t be correct, right?” Ajax said, back on the march with everyone else. “Because if she is, we won’t have an excuse to march any more, and there go my marching jokes.”

  “God works in mysterious ways,” Cronos said, extending the flame on his burning cross just enough to burn off some creepy-crawly insect the size of ground hog climbing up his leg, without damaging his camo pants.

  The smart camo pants had switched to splotches of color that were more typical for this off-colored forest, consisting mostly of burgundy, mauve, and purplish hues.

  Cassandra’s skin did the same for her.

  Omega Force could have accepted nanites into them that would allow them to do the same, but they were very hesitant to look less than human. Even Alpha Unit, comprised of the younger teens, mostly went in for homages to their favorite sci-fi films and video games. Ariel had taken to sporting Spock-like ears, her temperament though more Romulan than Vulcan. And Motown was gradually morphing himself into The Illusive Man from Mass Effect. It seemed everyone wanted to hold on to what distinguished them most from more alien humanoids.

  Ajax once again interrupted Leon’s train of thought. “In the far distant future in the year 4527,” Ajax said, “a number of scientists from all over the universe were having a convention on a far distant galaxy. Two beings were seated next to one another when they struck up a conversation. ‘Where are you from?’ the one asked.

  “‘I’m from Alpha Century,’ he answered. ‘Where are you from?

  “‘I’m from Earth’ was the answer.

  “‘I know someone from Earth,’ the Alpha Centurion said. ‘John Smith. Do you know him?’”

  “Think you need to compress your timeline there a bit, buddy,” DeWitt said.

  “No shit,” Ajax replied.

  Leon kept his focus on Crumley, willing his mind to crawl over the banter, and willing Crumley to respond to his psychic request to come into himself before all was lost. Techa, did Leon miss the days when a statement like ‘all was lost’ was little more than hyperbole. And “all” was little more than his entire Omega Force unit, and whatever relatively inconsequential mission they were on courtesy of whatever oligarchs were pulling their strings to enrich their own pockets, usually at some country’s expense, like the unending wars in Afghanistan that America could mysteriously never extricate themselves from, which were really about securing the sixth largest oil reserve in the world for ExxonMobil, and the opium trade so America’s Special Forces missions would have an endless supply of money to run their ops, and the rare-earth metals to power the computer age that gave the reigning transnationals a lock on their hi-tech empires. It was disgust over that state of affairs that had led Leon and his people to sign up with Natty. He wasn’t regretting that decision right now, just gritting his teeth over the Machiavellian genius oligarchs displayed at the galactic level that made the relatively smaller fish operating at a global level seem simple-minded.

  Crumley stopped once again, dead in his tracks and turned. “I’ve located it.”

  “Damn, there go the marching jokes. Just when I was coming into myself,” Ajax bitched.

  “It’s the mantle of the planet itself, the mix of alloys in it detects tachyons at a distance. There are cloaked Klash ships in orbit using their scanners to read the information and pass it along. They would have left satellites in place to complete the COMMS link to this planet, but couldn’t risk them being taken out.” Crumley looked up at Cassandra. “I guess you were right.”

  She was too busy winding herself up to take notice, her eyes already on the skies. Leon squeezed her hand again. “We’ll handle this?”

  “How?” She hissed, sounding like a Blue again.

  Leon turned to Ajax. “Your turn to shine. I’m guessing Mother upgraded all of you in keeping with your general propensities. And since you’re our sharpshooter, I suggest you materialize a weapon the way Crumley did with that grenade earlier and shoot the ships down.”

  “Ships in orbit? That I can’t even see?” Ajax bitched.

  “Use your third eye,” Leon coached, tapping the center of his forehead.

  “You want me to shoot a bullet out of this gravity well that will arc toward its target at several hundred thousand miles an hour, which is its only chance of catching up with the ships in orbit, as the planet turns under them?”

  “See, you’re thinking the shots through already,” Leon said. “I’m thinking you’re going to need to fire something other than an ordinary bullet.”

  “No shit!” Ajax blared. “But Crumley had Patent adapt that smaller version of his backpack for him for his waist pouch. The damn thing had a space-time manipulator in it, modified from…”

  “The alien tech we commandeered on The Star Gate mission,” Leon said. “Well, you’ll just have to improvise and pull the weapon out of thin air.”

  Ajax stared at Cassandra for added reassurance. She showed him the whites of her eyes as she scanned him. When they cleared, she regarded him and said, “Mother has indeed upgraded you with these abilities.”

  “I’m sorry, but there’s no way a genetic upgrade, with or without nanites is going to…!” Ajax was actually getting more wound up, not less, from Cassandra’s reassurances.

  “You all now have Guardian DNA in your mix, not nearly as much as me, but like me, you are likely almost entirely clueless as to what you c
an do now,” Cassandra said matter-of-factly. Very generous of her to dial back the impatience briefing these boneheads—at least from her perspective.

  Ajax stared at his hands, turning them face up, possibly thinking he would do his materializing with them, trying to get his mind around the new reality.

  Cronos eyed his flaming cross, no doubt realizing, as Leon was, for the first time, his power of belief was in fact working the miracles with the burning cross, and not the nanites making it up.

  DeWitt, determined to get in on the act of embracing his higher self, said, “Well I don’t feel any less stupid.”

  “She’s just a supersentience, DeWitt,” Cassandra said. “For those kinds of miracles, I suggest you follow Cronos’s path.”

  And there it was. Leon frowned. Well, she contained herself better than usual. Never mind DeWitt’s beaten-dog expression.

  Ajax materialized a rocket launcher on a swivel with a seat attached, just beyond their circle, climbed in the seat, and waited just long enough for the weapon to swivel into position and the barrel to adjust at the right angle before firing at the sky. He did the same again and again, presumably until the Klash space fleet guarding their latest find on Truil had been taken out.

  Cassandra’s eyes went white briefly then cleared. She turned to Leon. “His job is done. You will need to establish the same cloaking devices here that you’re using to hide the Earth and its moon, before the Klash stumble onto it again. This planet will go a long way to protecting the Gypsy Galaxy from invasions into its space via wormholes, artificially triggered or otherwise.”

  The same idea, of course, had occurred to Leon, as she must have known it must. Why then…? He noticed Ajax running his hand over his new toy, still marveling at his manifesting ability. And he had an idea why Cassandra said what she just said.

  He turned to DeWitt as DeWitt squinted his eyes and manifested the same protective array of Tesla Towers they had manifested on Earth and its moon to shield the planet and the moon artifact. The Towers stretched across the horizon.

  Cassandra’s eyes went white as she confirmed the placement of the towers about the entire planet to ensure sufficient redundancy, perhaps, and whatever other safeguards were in place she was looking for. When her eyes cleared, she smiled her satisfaction. “Nice,” she said. She had actually paid someone a compliment. Will wonders never cease?

  DeWitt stared at Leon, letting up on his hangdog expression. “I could never have invented that technology on my own, but I’m not half bad at aping what I see.”

  “Just can’t do me convincingly enough yet,” Leon ribbed playfully, showing the whites of his teeth.

  “Maybe if you could stay the same long enough for me to get a lock on you.” DeWitt lowered his eyes in shame. “I guess I know that’s not the answer. You’re blessed by the gods somehow, in a way I don’t fully understand…”

  “You and me both,” Leon smiled.

  “And so could never emulate,” DeWitt said, completing his thought after being so rudely interrupted.

  Leon had a thought of his own to finish before he was so rudely interrupted. “Blessed by the gods” once again sounded a little too much like “toyed with by one of the Guardian species” for his tastes. But he let it go. This wasn’t an all about him moment; it was an all-about-Omega Force moment.

  “Well,” Leon said, “looks like fighting with one another from now on won’t be the vacation from our weightier worries that it once was. I’m sorry for bringing that on you. I can tell by the way you look at Cassandra this was a moment you feared happening, not something you were looking forward to.”

  The rest of the team regarded one another.

  Crumley spoke up eventually for all of them, perhaps putting into words what the others could not. “Don’t look now, but relative to the big picture, our small piece in it is relatively unchanged. Just that the big picture is so much bigger now. Looks like Mother responded to our prayers only not to be diminished by the growing scale of things further, not to make us any more than we were meant to be.”

  “I imagine you won’t always be able to push beyond yourselves,” Leon said, “at least not to this degree. Just as Cassandra won’t always be able to. The gods—or the Guardian races, as the case may be—empower us I imagine to the degree that is necessary in the moment, making their calculations much like the Mars war god and Mother do, I imagine.”

  “And by extension, I imagine we can’t always predict if they will be on our side,” Crumley said. “Some lessons only suffering, loss, and hardship can teach. The more things change, eh?”

  The team was beaming out again, to a new location. The fact that Omega Force, empowered even as they were now, was still going to have to fight hard to keep up—across however many cloned teams…The truth was, Leon didn’t want to think about it.

  He’d grossly underestimated what this simple “distraction” that was only meant to last long enough for one of the other Leons to pull off the prison break, would cost them; the size and scale of the “distraction” would grow too.

  One thing was certain: The Collectors were behind the conflagration growing well beyond what was intended. Leon had played into their hands beautifully. They had hung back, studying all the players, learning their strengths and weaknesses, stirring the pot just enough from time to time with the stew at a low simmer, to study how the players reacted to one another under pressure, before turning up the heat for real.

  ONE HUNDRED SIX

  THE GYPSY GALAXY

  THE PLANET TEFLON

  Omega Force, once again, had been beamed to another world conjointly by Mother and her Mars war god.

  It hadn’t taken long for things to get bloody.

  Teflon, ironically, had been named for the non-stick nature of the materials mined here, and their ability to ensure debris impacting the hull of a spaceship—even when zooming at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour—never damaged the hull, but slid off harmlessly, without “sticking.” This was crucial for when energy shields collapsed for one reason or another. And while Mother had merely charted the planet and assigned it the name based on what she’d found here, and on her extrapolations of what these rare-earths could do in combination, intending to set up mining operations in the future, the Klash had already taken this idea well beyond the speculative state.

  The irony lay in the fact that almost all of Omega Force had been hit in one way or another, some healing better than others, depending on whether their nanites were up to the task of whatever they’d been struck with. But Omega Force had definitely lost their “non-stick” layer; their mounting wounds were becoming all too real. So far, Cassandra alone was healing in real time. “We don’t have to put up with this,” she hissed as much as said.

  “You are not cleared to utilize anything but your nextgen nanites, Cassandra.” Leon’s voice was stern. “Let your Guardian genes continue to affect their own healing.”

  “Not a problem. That’s more than enough to put a hurting on these bastards.” She slipped into the woods before he could say any more, or even get out a sigh. He sighed now, thinking that the Klash were still being considered as potential allies, and Leon was more determined than ever to include them in the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping. Much like the Kang who had their own specialized uses, they were just too valuable to leave behind, and far more versatile.

  From the looks of it, the Klash could handle most any transgalactic conflict moving forward on their own, allowing Leon to hold back with the big guns, namely their Legacy tech, for keeping the bullies at bay; for instance, should they be ganged up on by multiple TGCs and TGEs at once, or should a universe-scale civilization decide to pounce them.

  Negotiations with the Klash would be ticklish, and not likely pulled off with anything short of Natty’s fourth brain, using all of Leon’s major ensemble players to keep them in check, namely himself, Sonny, Solo, Cassandra, Natty and Laney, Theseus, and the team leads of his ever-proliferating Special Forces groups.

 
Teflon didn’t look like the Klash were the first alien race to mine it. There was artifact tech lying about suggesting this world had been heavily mined—to the point where the circumference of the entire planet had shrunken by over thirty percent. Equipment spanning several generations and civilizations had simply been abandoned because all parties had been here long enough to refine their mining methods further. As to how Leon knew the planet had shrunk by thirty percent and not say, ten percent, the scanner in his hand, which emitted tachyons, courtesy of Mother’s and Alpha Unit’s latest upgrades, told him as much. It allowed him to read the planet back through time. If he wanted to slow the time-lapse further, he could even tell you how many civilizations were once here harvesting and for how long. But such matters could be left for Mother.

  Leon’s concerns, when he had more time to ponder them, would hinge more around why had those civilizations not come back? Had they evolved better technologies, negating their reliance on these older rare-earth metals? Had they collapsed in their inability, over time, to transcend the dichotomy of good and evil, refusing to integrate the two extremes, until one or the other drove them to stagnation? Had they since found sources for the same materials closer to their home worlds? And what did any of them know of Earth, even from its more “primitive” days? Leon reminded himself that depending on when those civilizations had visited the Gypsy Galaxy, Earth may have had a far more advanced civilization than they had now. Just their knowledge of Earth could mean they posed a threat. All the more so if one of those early visitors had since matured into one of the Guardian races. More mysteries he couldn’t afford to ignore except at his own peril—but again for later, when he had the time to ponder them. How long could he hold out before his mind had no choice but to meld with a supersentience so he could pursue all these lines of investigation simultaneously—even as he was fighting one war, looking to gain a footing in the war that was yet to come, or looking for how to avoid a clash with another TGC or larger waiting in the wings to take a bite out of them once the meat had been seasoned well enough by time for their tastes?