Teflon looked like the painted hills of Oregon and Arizona, recalling the picturesque vistas from Earth. The mining tended to interrupt the well-ordered rainbow bands of color, marring the landscape. Left to him he’d turn the entire planet into a nature preserve, tech-hungry alien competitors be damned. But he could see trying to justify intergalactic wars all to protect one big rock in space otherwise known as a desert world. Maybe down the road he’d have the chops to keep the wolves at bay.
He peeled back a protein bar’s wrapper and nibbled. Omega Force had all been around long enough to have their own rituals. That’s all this was; his nanites could sustain him damned near indefinitely, especially on solid ground like this, where they could enable him to eat sand. He’d smoke his pipe next, another long-standing ritual. The only reason he wasn’t doing both at once was that his other arm had been shot off just above the elbow, and he didn’t heal as rapidly as Cassandra. Both his legs were out of commission, too, for that matter, the femur popping out of one, the other busted at the knee and bent at a God-awful angle definitely not appropriate for anyone living. Yep. Definitely time for a smoke and a protein bar.
What his body really needed was water, but his nanites were too damned efficient at their jobs to allow him to waste any of that to a desert world.
Crumley crawled toward him on all fours, looking nearly as blown to hell. “How long did it take us to get into this sorry state? My self-regard algorithms are denying me access to such information.”
“I don’t blame them. Less than thirty seconds,” Leon replied, after taking another small bite, chewing slowly, and salivating like there was no tomorrow, extending the savory piece of heaven as long as possible. “If I wasn’t your fearless leader who can’t afford the indulgence of lying to myself, I’d be doing the same.”
“Who the hell leaves a drone army to protect a mining operation that hasn’t been of any use to the miners for millions of years?”
“You gotta admire the longevity of their drone army and the mining equipment drones still slavishly carrying out their orders for masters that will never return.” Leon surveyed the sight he just described. “The good news is, now that the threat has been deemed neutralized, in their opinion, they could care less about us. We appear free to discuss the meaning of life and other such trivial matters.”
Crumley chuckled hoarsely, it was really more of a cough, that included some expectorated blood. His laughing apparatus was a bit offline after a drone hit. He’d had to sew his jaw back together with fishing line laced with nano from his field kit, to make the repair job on his body’s nanites a bit easier.
He pulled up a seat next to Leon, resting his back against the same rainbow-color-banded sand dune, well, earth mound, to be more precise. It was a little too compacted and hardened into place, even if it may have been a sand dune once. “I thought Mother had upgraded us with better nanites.” Crumley winced, as he tried to get comfortable.
“Whatever set of clones we are rolling off the assembly line, I’m guessing we’re degraded over the first ones to roll off. Such is the price of fighting a transgalactic war, I presume, as resources run more and more thin.” Leon took another bite out of his protein bar, checked his left arm to see if he could possibly juggle smoking and eating at the same time, saw that that was still out of the question.
“Does it unnerve you,” Crumley asked, looking about at the broken record that the mining operation had grown into, “that civilizations this advanced have at least visited The Gypsy Galaxy at one time, if they didn’t originate here, eons before we were even walking upright?”
“It unnerves me terribly, if you must know. I don’t think I’ll ever get a solid night’s sleep again.”
Crumley pulled a mango out of his waist pouch, the same one he’d pulled a futuristic acoustic grenade out of on another world—Leon could barely remember which by this point.
“No way,” Leon said.
“I had Patent modify the pouch further for me. Not only is it a space-time distorter, borrowing from alien tech, meaning I could probably pull a full-size tank out of that thing, but it’s connected to my neural net via my nanites, allowing me to manifest whatever I imagine. He’s thinking of applying the idea to himself if he ever gets tired toting that backpack robot around with him with the same space-warping legacy tech. But I suspect the thing has become too much of an old friend who wears better than a comfortable, broken-in pair of army boots.”
Leon grunted. “Yeah, I think you called that one right.”
Crumley bit into his mango and Leon did his best not to be jealous.
“What the hell you think Cassandra is up to?” Crumley asked.
“I’m just speculating, mind you, but I’m guessing she sensed a Klash presence that our scanners cannot pick up. And she’s out venting her hostilities with another mass genocide.”
Crumley shook his head. “There was a time when we frowned on such things, even with our enemies. Hell, I don’t remember ever taking such an attitude with bug spray against invading cockroaches.”
Leon crumpled the wrapper in his hands, and ate it too. It was the best tasting part, some weird sugary polymer, that kept them from polluting ecosystems they entered, designed by the tree huggers of Theta Team, of course. Who else?
“Yeah, well,” he said, “turns out what we refer to as a genocide anymore, is just a local, planetary skirmish, that hardly amounts to anything, save for, in this case, protecting something that even these mining interests established long ago were unaware of. That or they were already too evolved to need it. Have you put your finger on it yet?” Leon asked.
Crumley sighed. “Nope. Maybe I’ve lost the magic.”
“Maybe you’re just regenerating like Cassandra, at your own good pace. I imagine it gets easier with time, like training any muscle. But it could be something else. Could be the precious metals themselves on this world are throwing off your psychic radar.”
Crumley harrumphed.
“Either way, the version of me aboard the Nautilus,” Leon said, “had best get his head out of his ass. We’re running out of clones, and if the Klash can afford to expend energy for backup supplies they might never need, as their shields may never fail, they’ve got us against the mats, just that we’re too much on the front lines to see it at our level.”
It occurred to Leon rather belatedly that the rest of Omega Force had yet to regroup. “Ajax? Cronos? DeWitt?”
“Oh, them.” Crumley took another bite out of his mango. “Their nanites are being forced to reconnect their body parts like jigsaw pieces. They won’t be crawling toward us for some time. Just as well. Hate to have such a meaningful conversation cut short.”
They sat in silence for a while.
Leon’s severed arm beneath the elbow had finally grown back enough for him to be finally able to enjoy his pipe.
“I’ve figured it out,” Crumley said, “why Mother deposited us here, and it’s got nothing to do with the Klash presence, or their search for Teflon rare-earths. It’s the planet’s core. It blocks scanners. That’s why the Klash couldn’t detect it with their ships, and why not even Cassandra could sense it.”
“How the hell did it pop up on Mother’s radar then?”
“Presumably the mining operations set up millions, if not billions of years ago bore investigation simply because it implied supersentiences far superior to her own had found a reason to visit.”
“That, or possibly she used your new abilities as the direction finder,” Leon said, “better tapped in to them than you are yourself yet.”
Crumley frowned, perhaps feeling he’d let Mother and Leon down both by still trying to get his mind around his new abilities. “In any case, Teflon’s real gift to the Gypsy Galaxy is a material that can block both the psychic seeing of Guardian races, and any tech designed by any of the derivative races—that’s you and I in case you were wondering…”
“Yeah, I can see why Mother bothered to teleport us here, taxing her reserves fu
rther. Nice work, Crumley. Now, let’s just hope our nanites can put us back together in time to do a damn thing with that information.”
“Better hope. Things are going bad enough for us already. And the Klash are the only ones with technology to cleave this planet apart in no time to put those new materials to work for them in real time. Not like they have to invent or steal the entire supply chain necessary to realize that dream.”
“I might have some ideas about that.” Leon transmitted his thinking to Cassandra so she’d be ready when the time came. It wasn’t like she had trouble fighting one war while preparing to fend off another at the same time.
ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Patent reconnoitered with Leon in their usual place, a perfectly ripe location for co-conspirators, overlooking the stars from the Nautilus hull port, directly over a launching bay for some of her more powerful warbirds. Technically speaking, the space couldn’t be accessed except by the two of them, so it was entirely immune from eavesdropping, even aboard a ship that was technically beyond such things.
The view out the ship was hardly inspiring. Mother’s war birds were getting their asses kicked, no matter what vantage point Leon’s finger swiped the smart screen to.
“Leon, we cannot afford to exhaust our superpowers buying you time.” Patent’s voice was gruffer and more impatient than he meant for it to come out without betraying his true sentiments on the matter. “Even Cassandra and the Blues can be overtaxed, especially with this battle a long way from being over.”
With his eyes still to the countless suns, Leon sighed. “You’re right. Tell the other star players it’s time to step it up. The Tinka are starting to look like the one party we may not be able to contain any other way, but I’m not ready to drop the Kang on them just yet. I have to be sure I’m doing the right thing.”
“Leon, sometimes even good decisions end badly. You can flog yourself to your heart’s content when this is all over, just not now.”
“Have the rest of the brain trust buy me some time!”
Patent ground his teeth and excused himself before Leon’s rising temper betrayed more of his true feelings.
ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
SOL STATION RA
THE RIPPA HIGH COMMAND CENTER
“The Rippa are going to be a problem,” Xenon said matter-of-factly, his uncompromised confidence quite unlike Sonny’s other Shadow Warriors, who had the good sense to cower before relaying such putrid news. The two men strode side by side toward their meeting with the Rippa high command.
“We’ve got to have dirt on them,” Sonny said, “we have dirt on everyone.”
“I assure you no one will care. They supply military assets in almost any quantity and quality desired to whoever is willing to pay. As such, every galactic empire in the Menagerie loves them. Make a move on them and instead of the Menagerie war lords converging on Leon, you will be their prey of choice.”
Sonny’s nostrils flared and the teeth he showed would definitely not qualify as a smile, nor would the growl be all that endearing. “Then we’ll offer to increase their sales by playing the various empires off one another better than they can, to increase attrition of assets.”
“Good luck with that. Their supersentients exist to do nothing else. And let’s not forget all the willing help the Rippa get from The Collectors, happy to amp up any infighting.”
“Then that’s our edge.” Sonny nodded, switching from fuming mad to pleased with himself in a single stride, his dog genes no doubt playing their small part in his mood swings. “The Collectors never leave their home base, so they can’t be everywhere we can. What’s more, why waste their psychic energy bending minds when we’ll be happy to do it for them? The Collectors can just point us to any loopholes in the Rippa supersentients’ thinking those psychic vampires have latched on to, and we’ll take it from there.”
Xenon nodded. “That could work.”
Xenon had prepared Sonny, as he had with the Klash, before meeting the Rippa as to what they looked like. Sonny still needed a beat as they stepped into the command center.
The Rippa were a shape-shifting species comprised of a liquid metal-nanite composite. The adaptation had come about as a means of right-fitting every spaceship they manufactured to the specific requirements of the users. If the spaceship in question had a hundred and fifty stations, the Rippa in charge of that ship’s design and manufacture would shape shift 150 times until he or she got each station to fit like a tailored suit to accommodate the lifeform’s range of motion and body type that would be occupying the station.
As the Rippa high command was currently completing construction on their solar station situated within the sun’s core, they had shape shifted into virtual giants to work on the inner shell of the dome. Construction workers were not allowed to do the work for them and thus have insight into what actually held the dome together and protected it from the sun’s heat.
The leadership team was none too startled to see how readily Sonny and Xenon had entered the airlock of the dome by way of the UFO attached outside it. They were equally nonplused by the bodysuits their uninvited guests sported that protected them both from the heat and the crushing gravity, even in here.
The Rippa high council immediately shrunk down to about one and a half times Sonny and Xenon’s sizes to examine their body suits in detail, touching them, squeezing, scanning with eyes designed to clearly see through anything.
“Forgive us,” Sonny said to the group of generals as a whole. There was no point referring to them by name as they formed a kind of group mind. The group mind benefitted from the uniqueness of each contributor; they were in no way homogenized. But they were mind-linked. “We come to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
The Rippa shrunk further down to Sonny and Xeon’s sizes, though still maintaining a strategic height advantage. “I can assure you such a thing is impossible,” one of the generals said.
He had already calculated Xenon’s and Sonny’s bodysuits’ ranges of motion, and what they could allow Xenon and Sonny to do should they decide to turn this into a combat stage, and had morphed himself accordingly, no doubt to make this a fair fight, but it was highly likely the Rippa high council had already modified the humanoids’ suits designs to give them an advantage, not just in combat, but in negotiating the subsequent sales of the upgraded products to a new potential customer.
Sonny laid out his plan as he and Xenon had discussed on the way in. The high council tossed the idea about, conferring psychically, shifting their attention among one another as strategic advantages and disadvantages were debated. But the end result was as Sonny had predicted: an initial “No” which would be followed by further haggling on Sonny’s part.
The only speedbump along the way Sonny was certain had worked to his advantage. At one point all the generals winced collectively and put their hands to their heads. Sonny had come to recognize this as a sign of The Collectors’ presence. They seemed able to implicate themselves inside anyone’s mind at any time. They were no doubt adding their seal of approval to the pact perhaps along with some additional arm twisting. When the pain had subsided among the Rippa, the conversation resumed.
“We accept your proposal,” the linked group mind of generals said at once.
Sonny bowed to one and all, and he and Xenon took their exit. God forbid he sour the deal by outstaying his welcome. They did have Sonny’s solar command center to finish building for him, Sonny thought smugly, snickering inwardly.
***
THE NAUTILUS
NATTY AND LANEY’S PRIVATE SUITE
“Who are these people?” Natty exclaimed, his voice crescendoing the entire time. He gazed closer at the small print on his smart screen. “Mother says they’re referred to as the Rippa. That’s all we get is a name? With an entrance like that, you’d think we’d at least get a ‘Holy shit! It’s the Rippa!”
Natty was currently trying to squeeze his head like a grape, pressing
in at each temple. “These Rippa are going to be a real problem.” Natty was now pacing and biting his nails in the face of one space fleet popping into the Gypsy Galaxy after another. He was watching the same big screen monitors as Laney, the smart screens feeding intel from Mother’s probes placed strategically throughout the Gypsy Galaxy to give bird’s eye views like this.
“Can you imagine the kind of power required to open a worm hole big enough to move an entire space fleet through at once?” Natty exclaimed. “Each one of those ships is a galactic-scale cruiser! We’re not talking fleets of jet fighters here.” More pacing. “Remember when it took the coordinated firing pulses of how many pulsars just to get the Star Gate powered up? Wait…”
Remembering The Star Gate mission, he raced to his desktop keyboard and started keying away, trying to keep up with the latest inrushing insight.
“You can do that work in your head with your mindchip,” Laney chided.
“I assure you, it’s tasked with running the algorithms to back up my thinking right now.” He continued keying as he talked without slowing. “Yep, I was right. That’s how they’re doing it. Or at least I think that’s how they’re doing it. It’s a contained, well-trained, well-behaved black hole. I suspect they threw some kind of shell around it to keep it from gobbling up the surrounding real estate. That way they can use it to launch their ships wherever they want instantly, without paying the steep price that tends to accompany such things as getting too close to a black hole.”
The algorithms were illustrating what he was talking about now for him as he continued talking. “Use that black hole container as a starship hangar, and you can park your fleets wherever the black hole flings them, in this case at us. You’ll notice those ships are arriving not even powered up. They didn’t get here on their own steam.”
Moving Earth Page 90
