Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  He paused so they all could take in the air show together.

  The first wave of the Menasi Harvester ships had arrived, responding to the moon ship communicator broadcasts of bounty to be had. Other waves would never come, once Soturi’s warning reached them. But since these Harvesters were already here, they may as well serve as a training exercise for Alpha Unit, and to help the Farasans grasp what was at stake. No doubt these Harvesters did much of what the mushroom ships were designed to do; they were just unique designs owing to the other greedy corporations looking to get their grubby hands on things that didn’t belong to them.

  “Broadcast the alarm to the rest of the Menasi fleet, disguised as coming from one of their own moon ships, explaining why these people are too formidable to be harvested. A few panicked outcries coming from these latest Harvesters might help sell the illusion, so long as there’s nothing in the transmission that suggests other parties, namely us, intervened.

  “If in scanning them, you realize this drama is repeating throughout the Gypsy Galaxy, eliminate all of the Menasi ships, just keep the intel for us on which Gypsy Galaxy worlds, apparently, are worth stealing tech from, in case Mother missed any of this info with her preliminary scans.”

  “Done.”

  Patent regarded her guardedly. “If you could at least flex some muscles, look strained in some way, as you commit mass genocides, and eliminate entire Menasi space fleets in a stroke, I might sleep better at night.”

  “Now that you’ve got me good and aroused, you won’t be sleeping for a long time.”

  Patent frowned and returned his eyes to the airshow in progress in the sky. The Harvester ships had not come prepared to put down technology as advanced as what they were facing, relying on preliminary scans of Farasa that they or someone had done. They might even have gotten a little help on that score by hacking Omni, or via tech from other galactic neighbors in the Menagerie, even Sonny himself or his Shadow Warriors. So the Alpha Unit cadets were definitely having an easy time making it rain Menasi ships from the sky. Soturi continued to intercede telekinetically, making sure that rain fell in the nearby ocean, lakes, and rivers, a bit more harmlessly than letting it fall on top of the city.

  It really was starting to look more and more like the Menasi contribution to the intergalactic war was to make use of it as cover to steal tech for their own purposes, either betraying an alliance they’d been talked into, or because they were never part of the alliance. Otherwise they wouldn’t have stepped onto the stage of an intergalactic war without tech that could better protect their own ships.

  “Put through a communiqué to Mother for me, please,” Patent said to the Blue, “to parse the timelines and make sure none of these gifts lead these Farasans down a path I come to regret. Too much technology too soon might have been a formula we got to work for us on the Nautilus, but I’m not holding out much hope with the politically and ethically compromised people of a stage zero civilization.”

  “Mother has already queued up the request and will intervene as necessary the second she has a chance to run the timeline sift.”

  Patent relaxed a little further into the air show on the news.

  Someone in the audience stood up and raised his hand to ask a question. Let’s hope, Patent thought, and that wasn’t a gesture on this planet meaning “attack now!” Patent pointed back to the man holding a cell phone that was as big as his head.

  “I’ve been informed by our chief astronomers that the asteroid bombardment that we were under is no more. The asteroids exploded before they could do us any harm. Were you responsible for that too?” the spectator asked. Like many of his colleagues, he looked like he might have evolved from a variety of colorful horny toad lizards common to the deserts of Earth.

  “That’s correct,” Patent said, his voice being translated for him on the fly. He suddenly felt like an idiot for neglecting to bring the subject up earlier himself. “I’m sure the Menasi were here to assure you that they could stop the asteroid bombardment if only…to wrangle concessions out of you. But those asteroids were cloaked ships in their employ.”

  The representative nodded sheepishly and collapsed into his seat, looking as shell-shocked as everyone else.

  “Don’t suppose you can do anything about their shell-shock?” he asked Soturi in his head.

  “You’d need a Cream for that. But you did what you could, working with what you have.”

  He assessed the crowd and decide she was right.

  “We’re winning far too many of these confrontations far too easily,” he said in her head. “Your ‘divine’ interventions notwithstanding. There’s something rotten in Denmark. Look into this for me, please. And have Solo and the Creams help you with parsing what’s really going on here.”

  “You’re right. Something feels off. I believe our true adversaries are forcing you to rely on the Blues, and the other queens on this multi-dimensional chessboard, including the supersentients, to extract you from one thorny situation after another that you simply could not have handled on your own. All the same, we should have suffered more losses by now.”

  “So, they’re giving us a taste of things to come, just enough to check our giddiness, but not enough to collapse our confidence.”

  “Precisely.”

  “So, are our better, or our worst angels sitting on our shoulders?”

  “There may be no answering that for a long, long time to come—even by my standards.”

  “Just how many billions of years old are you, anyway? Your organic workarounds to our overreliance on nanotech would have had to evolve more slowly, in keeping with the nature of nature.”

  She smiled vaguely at him. “You should know better than to ask a lady her age.”

  ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO

  THE PLANET CEREBRAS, IN THE MENTAS GALAXY

  SOPOS’S PRIVATE SUITE

  Sopos paced his private chambers, his hands clasped behind his back and his head held low. After blowing up the Pan Galaxia planet Scalazar, set aside for Mentas Galaxy negotiations between worlds, he had some serious explaining to do. It could all be justified, of course, from a rational point of view, but no one was likely to be rational after a stunt like that. Emotions would be running rampant. Besides, these were politicians and ambassadors from the Mentas Galaxy he was looking to address, so reason and rationales would be the least of it; they shared a different currency: political advantage and expediency. And right now, that was all pointing Sopos’s way—as intended.

  He couldn’t deny the effect the stunt had had on him. He’d awakened with nightmares every night since, the explosion playing on endless loop inside his head. There was Xenon, pushing him through the portal in the nick of time, allowing Sopos to witness the entire planet blowing up with Xenon on it, without it affecting him in the least. All it did was give him a concussion wave to ride up to the portal itself where he just smiled at Sopos. Sopos had everything to gain from the act of treachery and nothing to lose, and still the shudders ran up and down his spine, then as now, and every night since.

  The amount of psychic stress he was exuding was apparently attracting the psychic vampires. Sonny was beaming into Sopos’s suite, past all security measures—which was technically impossible—to commiserate with him. Or at least his avatar was, as his Blue, Gerlari, was not by his side. Sonny was not risking his life on this exchange, which suggested the news was not good, or that possibly he was personally involved in other matters of far greater importance. Sopos wasn’t certain which chagrined him more, the idea that he might be driven to lose all composure at the forthcoming news and lash out at Sonny, or the slight by Sonny that he simply wasn’t important enough to justify the presence of the Sonny original.

  “I’m here to offer you a gift, my friend,” Sonny said the instant he finished solidifying and wiping the smirk off his face.

  Since when do pit vipers have friends? Especially ones hiding behind a pit bull’s face? “Your timing couldn’t be more auspicious. The only thi
ng better than a miracle is a visit from Sonny, or so I’ve been told. And a miracle at the very least I am in need of.”

  Sonny gestured toward the wrap around windows of Sopos’s penthouse suite and the glass ceiling with a nod of his head and a movement of his eyes.

  Sopos gasped. The sky was filled with moons, small to be sure, or perhaps just further away than most.

  “For now, they are only visible in the sky to your eyes. They may look like moons,” Sonny educated him, “but they are psychic amplifiers. And they are keyed to your will. They’re powerful enough to enslave the entire Mentas Galaxy if you like, if strategically placed, if not all at once, then over time. But I’m certainly not suggesting you be so club-footed. I understand you Mentas prefer expanding minds over shutting them down. Perhaps you would prefer to use the psychic amplifier worlds instead to grow the minds of your people, so they one day can take on the Creams in an advisory capacity to galactic leaders. How you would choose to mature these minds to such an end is a problem I’m sure only you are qualified to address as the most advanced of all Mentas minds.”

  Sopos smiled. So, Sonny was only too happy to advance Sopos’s ends so long as it also strengthened Sonny’s position. If Sopos and his kind could indeed supplant the Creams in their unrivaled leadership capacity as the true powers behind the thrones of so many, Sopos would gain control of everything. And so long as Sonny felt Sopos in his back pocket, he had a check for both the Creams and Leon, and de facto, Sonny, and not Sopos was in charge of everything, everywhere. Let him think what he will. With such a tool as these psychic amplifiers it would just be a matter of time until Sopos turned the table on him, or worked side by side with him as equal partners as Leon and Sonny did now. “I’m delighted to accept your gift, of course. Please, anytime you need the services of my people, and of these strategically placed moons, as you say, feel free to call on me.”

  “At the risk of being unduly crass, I have just such a favor to ask in return. A small matter of the Jardarian galaxy.”

  Sopos’s eyebrows tented. Jardaria was the most efficient and advanced galactic-scale warrior society in the Menagerie. They were the Sparta to Mentas’s Athens; Sopos had studied up on Earth history in preparation for negotiating with Leon. The two, working in cahoots, would be unstoppable. Sopos was salivating at the prospects even before Sonny could get out the request.

  “Imagine, say, the negotiating edge it would give me with the Jardarian high command,” Sonny continued, “if suddenly their generals preferred to debate war stratagems all day rather than act on them, or chose to lay down the sword altogether. Equally disastrous would be if their minds grew a little too big so not even the Imperials could contain them.”

  Sopos smiled and nodded. “I’m tracking you entirely. Just say when you’d like us to intervene, and the precise tweaks to their warrior psychology you wish.”

  Sonny smiled and bowed to him, the subtext in Sonny’s body language all too clear – “Expect to hear from me soon”—and then he dematerialized.

  There was little doubt that Sonny had any shortage of supply of these moons for himself. These ones gifted Sopos were likely reproductions created by the Planet Eaters in the Gypsy Galaxy, of which Sopos had heard so much about on the grapevine.

  Sopos took a deep breath as he stared at his bounty in the sky. The speech he had to prepare in his head for the committee would be so much easier to commit to memory now, as it would be so much shorter with the help of the moons to fill in the gaps of his reasoning for him. The smile spreading across his face was itself not unlike a crescent moon taking shape.

  ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE

  MENTAS GALAXY

  PAN-GALAXIA HEADQUARTERS ON CEREBRA

  THE GREAT AMPHITHEATER

  Pan-Galaxia’s headquarters was not too unlike the world Sonny’s Shadow Warriors Special Forces had blown to hell, what seemed like a lifetime ago. The main difference with Scalazar was this was one of only two known worlds within the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping whose Gaia-like planetary supersentience fostered a calm, reflective, meditative mood. Both worlds came with purple skies. Sacrin, the Cream’s husband and oligarch, laid claim to one. And Pan-Galaxia to the other. The worlds weren’t necessarily in high demand as more money was to be made off of conflict than peace in most of the galaxies within The Collectors’ Menagerie.

  But many of the worlds within the Mentas Galaxy raised the rarefied intellectuals in high demand throughout the Menagerie. Needless to say, some were corruptible, or there would be no demand for them.

  It was believed, though a long way from proven, that something about the quality of the ley lines carrying chi through this sector of the universe favored the kinds of intellectuals Mentas could not seem to stop turning out.

  It was the vision of Pan-Galaxia to use Mentas’ greatest source of wealth—their ability to procure the finest minds in the heavens—toward the greater good, and not toward ends that merely fed into The Collectors hands.

  The large ocean world of Cerebra had been mostly hollowed out and turned into a city of daring scope and elegance. The raw materials of Cerebra had been used in shaping the city with little refinement other than polishing, sanding, glazing, cutting and faceting, and the rest of the arts that have accompanied working with stones and precious jewels since time immemorial. This was so as not to mitigate Cerebra’s Gaia effect—however it was procured.

  Zero pollution was tolerated on the planet, once again with an eye to keeping the natural environment and whatever secrets Cerebra held protected.

  The dazzling city extended through the entire expanse of ocean and the atmosphere above. Zero-emissions-air-ships that could also bore through the oceans brought more than dignitaries from across the galaxy. Spiritual heads, intellectuals of all flavors, CEOs and entrepreneurs—anyone who wanted to clear their heads gathered here. Scientists were permitted but not allowed to practice their science on Cerebra for fear of disturbing the ecosystem, though in truth no one knew how delicate or robust it really was. And the scientists were closely monitored—their every move in fact.

  The global city had a number of highpoints, like airport traffic control towers, stationed just far enough apart that the others could not be seen; they lay forever beyond the horizon.

  It was at one of those highpoints that Sopos was giving his talk. Due to the speech’s importance, it was being simulcast across the entire planet. There was no escaping it. No other debate was to ensue until everyone had assimilated what he had to say, by which time, no doubt, debate across Cerebra would be about little else.

  Sopos paced the theater in the round, the stage itself at the lowest point in the coliseum, the circular benches wrapping around the stage at ever increasing elevations and diameters.

  He had been bombarded with outspoken criticism for long enough that he was struggling to stay tuned into the hecklers.

  “Any talk of aligning with the Gypsy Galaxy is off the table!” The representative from the planet Stavros stood and boomed his voice across the room. The large-predators-tearing-at-one-another-sounds that formed their speech were translated on the fly by the room AI for those who needed ear pieces and for those with mind chips, nano-cocktails, and other mind modifications. “Only savages could destroy a world without provocation.”

  “And Sopos went along with it!” The Tropos representative bellowed, rising from his seat. “He is too compromised to be part of this senate any longer. I vote for his immediate removal.”

  The Tropos representative’s speech resembled insects mating, a variety of species, along with the amphibians trying to be heard over them. He refused to sit back down after the outburst.

  “Let me tell you just how compromised I am,” Sopos said, silencing the room with the surprise confession. “I agreed to the complete destruction of Scalazar, to excise the cancer that was growing there and threatening to spread throughout Mentas.” He sighed dramatically for the audience’s benefit. “Sadly, it was just the first of a long chain of steps tha
t will be needed to bring the worlds represented by those oligarchs back in line with the Pan-Galaxia vision for the future of Mentas. The amount of destruction they did in the time they held the reins cannot be underestimated!” He continued to let his voice rise and fall throughout his sermon to emphasize the roller coaster ride he was taking them on, to impart its excitement more than its horror. “We like to think that our minds are the most immune from rhetoric and psychological warfare, but, with sufficient finesse, we Mentas, too, can become not just twisted, but immune to reason, taking on the qualities of zealots who see all counterarguments as merely proof of one conspiracy or another.”

  Sopos brought up an image of the typical Mentas brain. “As you can see, unlike most humanoid brains which have two or three or four brains growing over one another, we have five. If any of those higher layers become subservient to the more primitive ones below,” he said, pointing with his stick to the 3D graphic, “the amount of damage we can do is incalculable. Our fifth brain is a recent development in our own evolution. The extent of what it can or can’t do is still being explored. But clearly, its capacity for evil is not to be underestimated if it is in the service of the more primitive fear-promulgating minds. If we’d allowed Scalazar’s co-conspirators to continue their plotting and scheming, we may well have outperformed any galactic federation in The Collectors’ Menagerie when it came to war-making and profiting at the expense of spreading humanoid suffering.”

  Some of the fight was going out of the room as various mumbling members begrudgingly admitted as much. Others with fight still left in them spoke up, taking full advantage of Sopos stopping to catch his breath.