Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  They were walking down one of the palace’s grand halls.

  “Where are we off to now?”

  “Home,” Farsi replied with a sigh. “We have done our work. Leon has decided to indulge the in-fighting of the Macoon and the Premonox for now, so as not to entirely starve the psychic vampires we refer to as The Collectors. He doesn’t seek a complete victory, only to make his point. Besides, The Collectors will have to think clearly enough to grasp the argument he’s laying down for releasing the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping from captivity. I will broker the peace between the Premonox and the Macoon once we’re free of the Menagerie.”

  She took a deep breath, sounding winded and enervated. “My son found the shortest path for us, alerting me to the Rippa and the RamRadden at just the right time to insert ourselves into the drama. The rest is up to the other players of the alliance. The escalation of tensions between the Gypsy Galaxy and its neighbors is receding rapidly, the other players falling into line like dominoes with the retreat of the RamRadden and now the Rippa.”

  “Leon can now make his play.” Sacrin smiled.

  “It’s not Leon’s play I’m worried about. It’s Solo’s.”

  Sacrin’s face collapsed like a soufflé too long in the oven.

  ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN

  THE TINKA GALAXY

  The Kang Queen pivoted, whipping her tail about so fast her own people didn’t have time to get out of the way. The Tesla Types, her Ming Class, waiting in the chamber to transfer their learning to her, and the progress they’d made mastering alien technologies, scrambled to pick themselves up off the floor as the Queen gazed well beyond them.

  Her world surrounded another that wasn’t there a moment before, orbiting it like a moon; the new neighboring planet was a giant.

  Excellent. Room to grow my hive.

  Responding to her thoughts, her dragon ships were already deploying to the surface of the new world. What wasn’t worth harvesting would simply be destroyed, cannibalized, as the neighboring planet was retrofitted up to Kang standards.

  The Queen knew at once what was going on.

  Her entire galaxy had been dropped over another galaxy, but not by The Collectors this time, by the very people whose Gypsy Galaxy had been overlaid on hers once before. She would have to bide her time before taking on either of those civilizations. There was first the matter of using this opportunity to build a few more rungs in that ladder of technology bridging her mastery of cosmic scale warfare with The Collectors and the Gypsy Galaxy.

  The Gypsy Galaxy leadership were using her and her people as a weapon against the Tinka.

  The thoughts of the Tinka were flowing into her, not just from this world they now abutted, known as Devilos, but from all the Tinka worlds. The minds of the Kang Queens acted as concentrators, scooping up intel from the worlds they were now adjacent to, and broadcasting that information to the other Kang Queens. Each queen was simultaneously marking their new territory, and sharing just the intel that their species might need to fend off the Tinka, just not so much as to invite the other Kang queens to challenge one another’s dominion.

  Leon’s high queen, the Nautilus supersentience known as Mother, had kept the line open just long enough to communicate its intent to all the Kang queens. They were being gifted this galaxy to test their minds on, to grow their intellects and the size of their craniums even further.

  They would be fed like birds in a cage from now on like this. They would behave because by the time they absorbed all there was to take in there would be another galaxy for them to consume and for the Kang Queens to expand into, until each one reigned over a galaxy all their own.

  It infuriated the Kang Queens to no end to be used like this, but their DNA was infernally hard to override, and their nature had remained unchanged for billions of years. No amount of tech absorbed had managed to put a dent in the ways of their people.

  So, for now, they would be good little birds, spending no time trying to escape their cages. If The Collectors had thought to do the same, the Kang may never have escaped their cage in the Menagerie in the first place.

  The Kang Queens would have their day with their latest captors, but for today, they would rejoice, and feast on the very brain food that her people depended on. A slave race that had since turned the tables on their makers, and many master races since, their time to turn the tables on the Nautilus queen would come in turn. She was already providing the Kang queens the means to that ends.

  The Kang Queen gifted with Devilos hissed and whipped her tail again. Her Ming Class, scrambling up off the floor, responding to her hissed instructions, jumped on to the latest dragon ships deploying. The early dragonship envoys to launch, with their own Ming representatives onboard, were already signaling the queen the nature of the situation on the planet’s surface.

  The Tinka society was constructed in a manner both analogous and entirely dissimilar to their own. Each galactic sector had a number of worlds with tech running from the very primitive to the exceedingly advanced. A Tinka queen resided on each world. The queens shared intel as the Kang Queens did.

  Depending on which alien civilization ventured into Tinka space, they would be greeted by technology just a bit inferior to theirs, baiting the invader to send in everything they had to take over a galaxy that would be relatively easy to conquer. Once that “all-in” order had been given, the trap would be sprung, and the Tinka would have their prize.

  The Tinka had caught many worlds in their snare in this manner. Every time they conquered a new world, a number of their more advanced ships would use their tractor beams to drag it into the Tinka Galaxy. And so, the Tinka would be that much more impermeable to the next interloper. They killed everyone on the captured worlds that were in charge, leaving only those with a thirst never to be oppressed again to join the Tinka.

  The Tinka queen existed as a mock queen; she had no real power over the Tinka, only the ability to negotiate on their behalf, and to rally and command motley bands of rebels like her in times of conflict. She had won her place in their society by electoral vote because no one was as proficient an escape artist as the Tinka queen.

  And while there was one of them for each planet occupied by the Tinka, over time, these queens had come to comingle their genes to ensure “freedom,” as an evolutionary capacity encoded both in DNA and learned behavior, grew stronger with time. To further lock in the secrets of their species’ unsurpassed rebel abilities, the Tinka Queens now relied on cloned bodies, the clones able to further safeguard that the treasure trove of learning from generations of escape artists were never lost. If any queen should fall, a new clone was printed up to replace her.

  For all their safety measures, the Kang queen saw readily through the flaws in the Tinka approach to fabricating queens. The Tinka queens couldn’t grow their brains as the Kang queens could; they couldn’t make the extra room needed for all that species learning over time. They had relied on fast, intuitive hunches, the winning strategy for any combat situation jockeying to the top of their minds in an instant, and acted upon just as quickly. But if these solutions failed repeatedly, the Tinka queens began to unravel, to distrust all the voices in their heads vying to be heeded as the one with the best escape plans.

  How easy it was to create the big picture overview simply by hacking and monitoring the countless communiqués going back and forth, however encrypted, between the egalitarian members on the Tinka worlds, something the Kang queen minds excelled at.

  Once she saw her enemy clearly, the Kang queen realized what she needed to do. The Tinka society was in many ways the opposite of her own caste system, which valued top down control over the anarchy of personal freedom for all, and an entirely egalitarian world. But in the Tinka queens’ society of mavericks was an endless number of drones with the potential to be made into queens. They would require far less of the queen’s royal jelly to move up in her caste system; far less micromanaging to grow their minds and their abilities. And the fact that they were all th
e harder to control did not threaten the reigning queens, for they were already in the business of nursemaiding younger queens, setting them free to reign over their own nest worlds, all the while growing their territory and their power by slavishly answering to the older queens whose royal jelly continued to exert its hold on them.

  If anything, the Tinka were the solution the Kang needed to make faster headway against more technologically advanced civilizations, to close the gap of understanding on them. And the riskier these encounters with more advanced worlds, so the Tinka, with their escape artist genes, would make it that much harder for those trying to impose their will on the Kang to do so.

  But the real prize…The Tinka genes might offer the Kang queens the one thing no Kang had ever been able to do, escape the pull of their own genetics, the primitive components of their psyches and their physiologies that refused to yield to change.

  Bringing their two races together would be a uniting of opposites for the greater good—at least as far as the Kang queen proximate to Devilos was concerned.

  This would be a brutal battle to the finish between both dynastic orders, the outcome unclear.

  Just the way the Kang liked it.

  The Kang Queens, moreover, sought to evolve their war-making techniques, not just the size of their brains. And the Tinka offered the Kang Queens domains that would be fairly equally matched once conquered, leaving no queen with more power than the other.

  The Tinka offered the Kang Queens a way to diversify their classes even further. The senior queen in the vicinity of Devilos was already sending out instructions to kill no one, merely to incorporate them.

  The Tinka would be infected with Kang larvae that would gestate inside them, never killing their hosts, just ensuring enough pain racked their minds and nervous systems that they remained loyal slaves—the instant they chose to abuse this gift of continued egalitarian freedom to do their thing the Kang was gifting them. They would be equal partners so long as the partnership agreements held. The Tinka queens would be elevated to Kang queen standards with the expanded brains needed to fulfill their function better. That would likely be enough to secure their loyalty. But if not…

  She liked the Tinka’s bait and switch methods. Fighting the Gypsy Galaxy had taught her one thing, to conserve her resources. Each one of her people killed was an egg that had to come from her to replace. The Tinka knew how to fight with less, and to never recruit more fighters or more hi-tech into the battle than necessary to win decisively and with a minimum of casualties. These were all qualities that would serve the Kang Queens well.

  With time, the Kang might grow to surround themselves with a number of bait and switch galaxies, allowing their enemies to exhaust themselves, while exposing their vulnerabilities, without ever learning the Kang’s true abilities.

  The Kang was already aware of everything going on in the Tinka galaxy because not only were the Kang worlds built to collect intel from all thought transmissions, broadcasted or not, but so were the dragon ships, and so were her people. Under a microscope one would see the tiny satellite dishes arrayed in the billions along the surface of the lowliest of the Kang drones.

  Yes, the fact that they would not be out to kill the Tinka now, merely absorb them, meant the Tinka had a huge fighting advantage, because, unlike the Kang, they would not be fighting with their hands tied.

  All the better.

  The Queen proximate to Devilos screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice penetrating space across the entire galactic sector she now oversaw, her people able to hear her by virtue of the satellite gathering dishes on their bodies and the fact that her transmissions were not actually in the form of sound waves.

  The war had begun.

  ***

  ABOARD THE STARHAWK ROGER PENROSE

  Skyhawk gazed up from the feed at Satellite’s workstation on the bridge at the big screen monitor, as Gaffon sprang from her captain’s chair, a shriek leaving her lungs even faster. In the same instant her ship fired everything it had at the Starhawk Roger Penrose.

  Even with the chief supersentience engaged and the Penrose’s navigator, Motown, synced with her in Singularity Time, the ship couldn’t dodge or destroy all the incoming fire. Too much of the tech on Gaffon’s ship was unknown to the Starhawk.

  “You’ll pay for this!” Gaffon shouted.

  The thunderous impacts to the Roger Penrose’s hull, which came in a series of bursts, forced Skyhawk to grab hold of the back of Satellite’s seat to keep from being thrown.

  “Look, lady,” Skyhawk replied in equally measured beats, “I haven’t even decided what to do with you yet. You could at least have the decency to give us a second to get our hate on.”

  New images were popping up on the Starhawk bridge smart screen, pushing Gaffon’s face out of the limelight to show the explosions taking place on the Starhawk. Their warp drive engines were out, not fully, yet; they were still busy exploding. Crewmates, albeit mostly androids uploaded with the consciousness of Earth’s smartest scientists, their neural webs boosted further by Mother’s nanites, were venting out of the science bays. The androids were blowing up on their own to keep the Tinka from getting to them before the Penrose could.

  “Alright, lady, I think I’ve got my hate on now.” Skyhawk signaled both Ariel and Satellite with mindchip to mindchip communications. They were linked to the Penrose’s chief AI, Samantha, as well, so her response was instantaneous.

  Gaffon’s face came back on the screen briefly, pushing the images of the Starhawk’s crippling destruction out of the way. “Every last one of you will pay for this if it takes until the end of eternity!”

  “Love and kisses to you, too, darling,” Skyhawk replied, unshaken. “Enjoy the parting gift.” He was surprised at how good he was getting at weathering death blows, both to his ships and his ego, moving from one clone incarnation and one ship to the other, memories of prior failures intact. He could contain most of the browbeating shit now in his nightmares, while he tried unsuccessfully to sleep; better that than entertaining that nonsense in his waking hours.

  “For releasing the Kang on us, enjoy our parting gift!” Gaffon declared, punctuating her remark with another scream.

  Gaffon’s ship turned tail, but not before her face melted, so great was her fury. Apparently that clone body she was in could only hold its consistency if she stayed relatively neutral. Maybe that was to ensure she didn’t lose it, and therefore any negotiating edge the Tinka could hope to hammer out with allies and adversaries alike. With her face melted off, the clone body looked like a cheap suit that hadn’t survived the first washing.

  One of Gaffon’s ship’s warp drive engines was off line from The Starhawk’s weapons that had reached it. But the remaining engine was more than her ship needed to skip across space-time at faster than light speed, heading back to the Tinka Galaxy.

  “Leon released the Kang on the Tinka?” Ariel said, her blank eyes suggesting she was already contemplating the implications.

  “I guess he’s done playing, and so am I,” Skyhawk said. “Show me the effects of our handiwork,” he said, turning to Satellite.

  Satellite, still in a state of shock at the news, was slower to react than usual. His Singularity link had been severed. Now that they weren’t actively engaged in battle, the Penrose’s AI prioritized her algorithms to putting out the fires on the ship, and initiating repairs. She’d transferred her singularity speed access to her engineering and maintenance crews—again, mostly androids with uploaded best-in-class relevant aptitudes from Earth.

  Satellite’s earlier hacked COMMS transmissions on Gaffon’s ship, this latest one, The Ragen, still holding, the transmissions came through.

  “Our navigation is down,” said Gaffon’s navigator. “When we come out of the space jump, we won’t know where in the Tinka Galaxy we’ll be, could be inside the molten core of a planet.”

  “All weapons are down,” another bridge crew member informed her. “If we jump into a battle scene, we�
�ll be defenseless.”

  “Our entire Galaxy is now at war with the Kang! There is nowhere to land where we will not face destruction!” Gaffon blared. “Drop us out of the time skip so we can affect repairs.”

  “Even if I could,” their navigator said, “and I can’t, these mutagens are spreading too fast.”

  “What mutagens?” Gaffon barked.

  “As far as I can tell,” their bridge science officer said, “the Roger Penrose beamed a prion-class bioweapon aboard before we could get clear. The mindless catalyst is tearing through the regional AIs across the ship, making them senile. If we’re not careful, before we can come out of skip, this ship will have turned on us.”

  Gaffon inhaled a hoarse, cancerous breath like someone with emphysema, possibly fighting the fluid filling her lungs as her clone body continued to give way under the assault of her imbalanced hormones, produced by her inability to keep her cool.

  “Take that, bitch!” Skyhawk spat. He wiped the drool from his mouth to avoid the distraction of it cloying at his skin.

  “Ah…” Ariel said. “I believe this is where Gaffon would say, ‘Right back at you,’ if her Earth speak was any better.”

  Everyone, having heard Gaffon’s last threat about the parting gift she’d left them, whirled around on cue, shouting, “What?”

  “Samantha is rebuilding the ship at a clip, her engineers synced to her in Singularity Time. Even the robots are fighting to keep up,” Ariel explained. “She’s turning the ship into a bomb.”

  Skyhawk ran his hand through his shoulder length straggly black hair, before pulling at his equally scraggly goatee. “Why? We’re in the middle of nowhere. What does she think she’s going to blow up?”

  “It’s not that kind of bomb,” Ariel explained. “The explosion looks like it’s meant to trigger a black hole, big enough to gobble up this solar system.”