Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  “So?” Skyhawk said, still looking nonplused. “Is there even any life here?”

  “There’s a cloaked planet and moon,” Satellite said, hacking past the cloaking device with his ability to communicate with virtually any contraption, even technology not designed to facilitate communications but block them. “It’s the Earth and its moon—you know, the one with the artifact that will allow the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping to power through space-time as if it were a speedboat—once we’ve escaped The Collectors’ Menagerie that is.”

  Skyhawk collapsed into his captain’s chair, the wind and the life kicked out of him. “I will not go down as the biggest fuck up in Earth history. What little remaining self-esteem I have will not allow it.”

  “I can’t steer us out of here in time,” Motown said. “My controls aren’t responding.”

  “You think she knew?” Ariel asked.

  Satellite shook his head. “No way. Their COMMS are a joke relative to ours and so are their scanners.”

  “So, then, just dumb luck in regards to what was meant as an impotent response to siccing the Kang at her. Maybe Techa is a goddess of irony,” Ariel mumbled.

  “Yeah, if Techa is on their side. Somehow I don’t think so. Though she’s got to have a certain fondness for tinkerers,” Motown said, tinkering with his console, trying to get it to bypass their currently fruit-loops Chief AI.

  “We have to blow the ship now,” Ariel blurted, “before it’s too late.”

  Skyhawk had ignored their banter, drilling down to the answer in back of his mind. Unfortunately, his response, when it came was no more than an echo of Ariel’s words. “Fine, we will commit suicide. Satellite, make sure the androids uploaded with personalities that simply refuse to do that are hacked accordingly.”

  Satellite swiveled back to his work station, mumbling, half-heartedly, “Great. Another death to add to the scoreboard. To go right alongside the order of mass murder of our entire crew. A new low. Just when I thought…”

  “Satellite!” Skyhawk blared. “Try to coordinate it so the blasts rippling through the Penrose are enough to take out this demon Gaffon unleashed on us. Never mind how.”

  “Ah, I’m going to need you for that with our…”

  Skyhawk didn’t give him a chance to finish, already beaming the intel mindchip to mindchip to avoid any more delays.

  “Tweaks to the auto-destruct notwithstanding, we still don’t know if this is going to be enough to do the trick,” Ariel said. “Maybe you should find a place to hide out, Skyhawk. If one person has to be left standing, it had best be you.”

  Skyhawk sighed. What a nightmare. Ought to put a nice spin on survivor syndrome, guilty for being the only one left alive, and even guiltier for the reason why: due to an unearned gift of genetics, he was too smart to die. That ought to have everyone in the rec-room of the Nautilus quietly pulling away from him from now on.

  “I’ve already calculated the one place on the ship that might survive the blast if it isn’t sufficient to do the ship in,” Skyhawk said. “Give me five-point-five seconds and pull the damn trigger.” He was already in the elevator as he said as much, and the elevator was already responding to his mindchip communiqué.

  Just his luck he hadn’t survived.

  But had the Earth and its moon?

  Things had gone dark before he could contemplate anything else.

  ***

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Skyhawk awoke for the umpteenth time in the loving hands of the Nun, expressing her love with snips and forceps inside his exposed chest cavity.

  “The Earth and its moon?!” he blurted before he could finish gasping.

  “They survived, thanks to you,” the Nun said, not taking her eyes off her surgery.

  He relaxed his head back on the gurney, glancing around at the Nautilus decks turned into medbays from the vantage point nearest the courtyard. He panned his head back to the Nun. “What’s with you and these live vivisections?” He hollered. “Not to mention the pain, bitch!”

  “Saves time bringing you up to speed. We’re at war, in case you forgot, and we’re losing. The pain I find helps to keep people from drifting off in the middle of my debriefs.”

  He screamed even louder from her latest handiwork. “Really! Cause you’re making me positively delirious.”

  He hammered the back of his head against the gurney in frustration, hoping to push away the pain everywhere else with a migraine. “How can the bioprinters still be down? What kind of half-assed operation are you and Mother running here?”

  “You think we have it rough,” the Nun replied, “you should ask the Tinka how they feel about their situation right now?”

  ***

  ABOARD THE TINKA SHIP, THE RAGEN

  Gaffon and her crew came out of skip drive, returning to conventional space-time, to find themselves crashing headlong into a Kang castle world.

  The castle world, protected by the excretions of her drones was impermeable to the exploding Ragen vessel.

  The Queen, swirling around in time, facing the impact head on, to Gaffon’s dying satisfaction, wiped the smile off Gaffon’s face by whipping that tail like the teeth in a giant chain saw at her, grabbing Gaffon about the neck, and ripping her off the bridge. Then the Kang queen turned her back on the Ragen, to protect her and Gaffon from the ship going up in flames.

  “So nice we can finally meet face to face without going through all our intermediaries,” Gaffon heard the Kang Queen say inside her head, speaking her language perfectly, as she dangled Gaffon in front of her at eye level with the aid of her tail. She tightened her grip slightly about Gaffon’s neck, as the tail snaked about her throat like a metal snake.

  “Don’t worry about maintaining this fragile body on your own. My Ming class has already deciphered your bioprinters.” The Kang queen, various regions of her brain lighting up, just the neural plexuses she needed to activate, sent the secretions through her body and out the stinger at the end of her tail to inject Gaffon with, repairing her skin suit. Gaffon looked like she did before her rage got the best of her.

  “Now, we really must get to know each other better,” the Kang Queen said, sending tendrils from her much larger head, which grew now out of her exoskeleton, like fine fiber-optic wires. She was extending her neural web into Gaffon. Soon Gaffon’s mind would be an extension of hers.

  Gaffon screamed at the horror of what was going on as soon as she realized the true nature of it. The Kang Queen was sucking everything this Gaffon and all the others knew, right out of their heads, using the mind links the various clones of Gaffon on all the Tinka worlds utilized to communicate wirelessly.

  Gaffon was powerless to impede the knowledge transfer, just as she was powerless to shut down the makeover of her own body currently taking place. She was becoming as much Kang as Tinka.

  The Kang Queen made the full scope of her plan known to Gaffon, whereupon Gaffon screamed the loudest she had yet.

  Strange how such a painless procedure could cause Gaffon to react so violently.

  But then, all those billions of years of evolution now had been for naught. None of it had helped her protect her peoples, the Tinka’s many species, from the Kang Queens. Perhaps if she had played the game just a bit differently, as the Kang Queen had.

  ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

  THE TINKA GALAXY

  THE PLANET GAMORA

  The entire surface of the planet was land mass. What ocean there was, was subterranean.

  Gamora sported other striking features to the uninitiated. The entire surface looked like one open MASH ward. Surgeries were constantly going on. Those trained in biohacking were highly in demand as surgeons. But doctors who couldn’t wield a knife were in demand as well; many could infect you with plagues or nanites that upgraded your ability to withstand pain, to fight on when wounded, or even dead. And, of course, the healers were just as popular with those not getting repaired, who merely enjoyed watching the open market butcher shop. Anesthesia wasn’t u
sed for any of the vivisections, which meant a lot of victims squirming in agonizing pain, either getting off on it themselves, or allowing others to get off on it.

  Gamorans were a cyberpunk or biopunk enthusiast’s wet dream, in whatever time they lived, on whatever world. No body modifications, however crude, however futuristic, however horrific, were ever refused outright, but merely worked into the one-of-a-kind, proudly strutting humanoid peacocks.

  Gamora was a dark, dark world without a sun. It, in fact, did not have a solar system to call home. It had gone rogue. In so much as it had a home, it was the Tinka Galaxy as a whole.

  As the Gamorans had long become accustomed to the darkness and wanted to keep it that way, the planet had been outfitted with a propulsion unit that kept it away from suns in its nomadic journeys.

  All this and more, Gaffon was proud of, or this version of her, anyway. She was prouder than ever of Gamora now that the Kang Galaxy had been overlaid on the Tinka Galaxy, and their fate was all but sealed. The Tinka were no less vicious or battle-worthy warriors, but the Kang were just too impenetrable. The Kang queens and their powerful minds just too hard to get around. If the Tinka stood any chance at all now, it was on worlds like Gamora, the rogue planets in the Tinka galaxy, that prided themselves on their independence, and that limited the communion of their Gaffon-figure-head leaders with the other Gaffons on other worlds. Had that communication not been limited, the Kang would already be on to the existence of the rogue worlds. Even if the Kang were on to them, the rogue planets were more maneuverable than the Kang’s castle worlds. They might still have the faintest of chances.

  Without illumination from a sun, Gaffon was lit up by the bioluminescence of its own people that could also go completely dark as necessary.

  That glowing figures helped Gaffon navigate through the marketplace’s throng without any special attention from her people, who saw her mostly as a means to an end, to help negotiate access to better and more varied tech from other worlds without going to war with them, as the Tinka would be otherwise inclined to do in the absence of a negotiator.

  Her people were radical individualists who resented authority in any form. They distrusted everyone, including their own kind. She, of all her people, could at least fake going along to get along long enough to interact with other peoples, worlds, federations of planets, and unions on any scale. And she was such an exception they had had no choice but to clone her, even if the cloning tech at their disposal was less than desirable. Even with the aptitudes her people had for making more out of less and working with junkyard tech, there was only so much they could do to stabilize her form. So, with time, each version of her grew more different than any other, more distorted, more grotesque, falling apart uniquely, and reverting to the one-of-a-kind baseline that was her true people.

  They had come to the Tinka Galaxy from nearly all others, criminals and outlaws by choice because the game had been rigged against them, contrived to keep them in their place forever as humanoid livestock for the wealthy and powerful to do with as they pleased. They had seen enough suffering at the hands of despots, experienced enough of it firsthand, that the mere sight of an authority figure brought out the raging, homicidal maniacs in all of them. The one seen as a person of authority would likely be cut down before they could get in a word edgewise. “We come in peace,” would hardly matter because they’d never get past the “We.”

  If the Tinka had any chance at all against formidable foes who were far more organized, it was in the hope that one of their mavericks might hit on a solution for throwing off the yoke of persecution that no one else could think of in a more ordered, regimented society in which the few thinkers allowed would be closely monitored and policed so as not to disrupt the status quo of the society from which they hailed.

  If she could have explained all this to Leon DiSanti, he may have understood, may have welcomed them into his fold, but he saw only a mad dog people lashing out at everything and everyone, refusing to compromise, to negotiate, to live in peace with others. And he had judged them in part based on Gaffon’s failures to keep her cool, to be the one person among the Tinka who could possibly get Leon to take their side and champion them. Her failure was even more inexcusable than Leon’s treachery. His decision, at least, had been based on logic; something any Tinka could appreciate; they were here in the Tinka Galaxy because logic dictated that any life worth living was one lived well away from most TGCs and TGEs in existence. Never mind the irony that Leon was professing to be formulating the first TGC along truly egalitarian lines; the first truly Tinka-like society. If only her people, if only Gaffon had let him get past the “We…” to hear “We come as your champions.”

  And now her people would pay the worst possible price, the welcoming embrace of the Kang, the most ordered, regimented, unfair society of them all, the one with the least choice, the least hope of salvation, from within or without.

  Maybe the Tinka and the Kang meeting like this was fated. Maybe on some psychic level the Tinka needed to know if their most successful of all anarchic world orders was superior to the Kang’s most successful of all hierarchical world orders; opposites attracted, after all. Would that union end in mutual annihilation, the persecution of the one by the other, or the fusion the Kang Queen was speaking of—something better, something transcendental? If it were to be as the Kang queens saw it, then it would be with Gaffon’s and her people’s enhanced empowerment, not enslavement, leaving her to negotiate a treaty between their two peoples deemed unnegotiable.

  Gaffon had already failed at a lesser challenge. Leon would have been far easier to negotiate with, if only the Tinka hadn’t lashed out so violently at the slightest provocation from the Gypsy Galaxy, a provocation she wondered now if even started with them, and not with The Collectors. The Collectors had much more to gain from it. For that matter, Sonny and his Shadow Warriors, who weren’t so unlike the Tinka as all that, so it would have been easy for him, understanding how well to push the Tinkas’ buttons, to play them.

  Even now Gaffon fought her greatest struggle to keep from lashing out in fury at everyone and everything, her people’s genes, long ingrained after so many generations of oppression, and so intolerant of injustice of any kind, that the mere whisper of it was all that was needed to spark a conflagration.

  Gaffon’s reverie was broken as much from her spiking hormones, as her rage flared, as the screams of the latest patient on a gurney she was walking by.

  Radion’s outcry climbed above the din of screaming patients in an outdoor operating theater that spread from one end of the planet to another, where anesthesia was anathema. His nuclear power packs feeding his exoskeleton, meant only to be worn temporarily for lifting heavy objects, were bleeding into his body. And, of course, Radion could no longer take off the temporary metal exoskeleton, made of exotic metals strong enough to help him do deep water construction work repairing pylons for bridges or drilling platforms. He’d also worked in a junkyard once stacking spaceships, after he hammered them flat enough to eat off of for a guy too cheap to pay for a traditional spaceship compactor.

  Radion was muscular, mutated, and a strong enough genetic freak without the exoskeleton, which struck Gaffon as overkill. But his people believed on building on strengths. They had all been made obsolete at one time or another by master races that exploited them until they were all used up and then replaced them by superior models, often genetically engineered to higher specifications. And while there was no longer a master race to beg mercy of, the stain of uselessness wore heavy on most Tinka, and for most, the solution was always one and the same: one or another upgrade.

  The doctor that had injected Radion ignored his struggles against his restraints. She knew if Radion wanted to truly break free, that was hardly the issue. He was just voicing his complaints loudly enough to let the doctor know that for what she was putting him through she had better fix him or face the distinct possibility of being stomped into pâté by her patient.

 
The doctor studying the reaction of Radion’s cells to the injection she’d just given him, turned the monitor to Radion. “See, you can stop your complaining.” She pointed to the chain reaction taking place.

  She unstrapped Radion, one restraint at a time, as the distrustful Radion continued to eye the monitor. When all the restraints were off him, he held his doctor off the ground by one hand, continuing to refuse to believe his eyes, which were still riveted on the monitor. He was looking for the reaction to reverse, convinced it was a trick; he would get ten paces, drop like a stone, and his body parts would be recycled to repair someone else with. It had been done to him before by one of his own people, that is to say, another Tinka. Many times before, in fact.

  Gaffon knew the story on all her people. She needed to if any of them were to intercede in a ticklish negotiation because someone had said the wrong thing to piss them off beyond any self-restraint. Without that knowledge, Gaffon wouldn’t know how to push their buttons to get them back under control.

  “Set her down, Radion,” she said. “The good doctor has done her job.”

  Radion swiveled his head toward her. “And why should I trust you, negotiator? You get paid to lie.”

  “We both know you picked a doctor who couldn’t lie to you. It’s not in her nature any more than it is in her genetic programming. Maybe if you’d gone to her first you’d have less of an attitude, and someone as pretty as me might actually take a fancy to you.” Gaffon lowered the hood of her robe, showing off her grotesquery, too long away from another clone body.

  Radion, taken by surprise, laughed and gently released the good doctor, patting her on the back. “Thanks, Doc. Please don’t mind the formalities.”

  He threw an arm over Gaffon and forced her to walk with him, capitalizing on that strength of his the way many of their pets did to herd their masters grown too old to walk a straight path on their own.

  Barely a person on Gamora was unaccompanied by a chimera, a botch job of various beasts’ genes spliced together into the most horrific looking demon imaginable. They were the personal body guards of all Gamorans who would hardly trust humanoids in such a role, and the creatures were loyal to a fault—that was one aspect of their gene mix never toyed with. That way their masters could sleep at night with just one eye open instead of both. “Night” on a sun-avoiding world being the specific two-hours or so each Gaffon chose to rest in a semi-hibernating state to recharge, sleep itself not being truly necessary. At any given time, there was never more than five percent of the populace asleep in this manner in the event their planet came under attack, not that it had for millions of years, but again, habits die hard among the Tinka; in certain matters, they were genetically hard-wired to a fault.