Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  When Mentoros looked up and could see no such ships, she pulled the words lacking in her vocabulary right out of his head. “In orbit. Bad people. They come to take our freedom.”

  “But how could you…?”

  “It was Lavaros. He couldn’t help it. He was upset at being left out of school. So he ratted you out. His mind is so powerful. He just put the thought in Veritas’s head. Just like that.” She flicked her fingers. “But now he understands that he was wrong. You wanted him to fit in too.”

  Put the thought in Veritas’s mind, just like that? Mentoros thought. Veritas was the supreme oligarch whose influence colored the actions of all the other oligarchs controlling the five galactic sectors of Helldros. Veritas was also on Centros, a planet several billion planets, suns, and other solar bodies away from them. Dear God! What was going on here?

  “Can you stop them from hurting us?” Mentoros asked.

  The six-year-old Myna chuckled. “Easy weasy.”

  Myna jumped up and down, her face turning red, and her fists clenched, “Dead! Dead! Dead!”

  She opened her eyes, the color draining from her face, the smile returning. “All done. Just like that nasty spider that tried to crawl all over me in my sleep.”

  Mentoros swallowed hard.

  “How many Transformer ships?”

  “An entire…” Again she didn’t have the word so she pulled it out of his head, “legion.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Six thousand ships. Aren’t you impressed I can count so high? I know you think I never pay attention in math class.”

  A Transformer ship had a crew, typically, of twelve hundred soldiers. He wasn’t sure he could do the math in his head if what she said was true about them all being dead. With those ships…”

  “No need,” she said. “Thank the gods. I hate wars. Nasty business.”

  No need? What was she referring to? Then he realized, she had plucked the notion of turning those ships against the oligarchs right out of his head. “What do you mean no need?” he asked, needing to be sure.

  “The oligarchs will soon agree to move the mindrite crystal worlds to The Gypsy Galaxy. Once the word is out on what we can do. They will come to be convinced we can unleash havoc there that will allow Veritas and his four minion oligarchs to take it over.

  “Havoc!” She jumped up and down and clapped at getting the word right. “I love that word, and I used it right, too, trust me.”

  “Mindrite crystal worlds?”

  “The mindrite crystals are what gives us children our special powers. It only works on us, you are too old. And there are two other mindrite academy worlds like this one. Of course, the fools didn’t know what they were doing when they situated the academies there.” She laughed, clapping their good luck.

  Mentoros was developing a nasty habit of swallowing hard; at this rate he was going to strain the associated muscles.

  The Gypsy Galaxy… All he’d heard about it thus far was rumor, circulating among the kids, who talked about it excitedly. “What is it about the Gypsy Galaxy that I should know?”

  “They are like us. They seek freedom for all peoples everywhere, and they will fight for it. They are developing an alliance of other galactic civilizations as part of their supply chain, with the Gypsy Galaxy as the premier war machine. They will be able to teleport that war machine anywhere in the multiverse—well, as soon as they get us out of the Menagerie. And that prison break is already in progress. While I don’t care at all for war, I do like Leon DiSanti. Did you know he once ended a trans-galactic war without firing a single shot?” She clapped. “My kind of general. You will like him.”

  “But how can worlds and galaxies possibly be moved from one place to another?”

  “They have a guy, Dillon… His head is a mess, but when it comes to math and physics, his mind is very orderly. Not only can they move worlds thanks to him, the entire Gypsy Galaxy Grouping is like an army forever on the march. The cluster moves through space-time better than a DeathRay cuts through water.”

  A DeathRay was a saucer-like mammal with a whip-like tail that existed in Developos’s oceans. The children had been told to avoid it on account of the deadly stinger at the end of its tail.

  Mentoros swallowed the last of the spit in his mouth. His mouth had run dry. His mind wasn’t far behind, blasted into emptiness by the shellshock.

  He looked up at the six year old. “Myna, you know better than to hurt people just because they wronged you, right?”

  “Duh!”

  “What?”

  “It’s human speak. It means, of course. I would never try to hurt Lavaros just because he made a terrible mistake. We are kids. We all make them, all the time, and people get hurt, but life goes on.”

  “You are very wise for a six year old.”

  “Duh. It’s the mindrite crystals, you ninny. We draw on their wisdom. They are ancient ones, dating back to even before The Guardian races.”

  “The who?”

  She sighed. “I must get back to my play. I will try and educate you up to some tolerable standards at our next meeting. But I fear this situation may persist for years. You are very dense.”

  She ran back to her friends and their laughter.

  “Dense?” Must be some other human word. The kids were fond of percolating new words through their cabals that they hadn’t been exposed to before as new lifeforms joined the academy from Helldros worlds. They absorbed one another’s cultures lightning-fast, owing largely to an amplified Seer’s ability to take in everything at once without judgement.

  Mentoros stared at the children playing, his mind unable to process anything anymore. Every once in a while the emptiness would be stirred by the same question rising to the surface of the crystal clear pond of his consciousness. “Has your moment finally arrived to get justice against Veritas and his minions, Mentoros?”

  ***

  IN ORBIT ABOUT DEVELOPOS

  Assissi was bedecked in his gladiatorial ware. A flimsy shoestring extended from his sandals and laced over his body, coming together at his groin in a metal-mesh basket to protect his genitals, belying the outfit’s true nature as combat gear. He looked all but exposed and hardly fit for fighting, but the sentient mesh could make subtle adjustments during an engagement to keep enemy swords, bullets, and lasers from impacting his exposed flesh. He rather liked how tradition played to his well-sculpted physique.

  Assissi boarded the Transformer ship. He’d been summoned here to listen to their terms, but by the time he arrived the ships had gone silent. All attempts to hail them had come to no avail.

  The landing bay had received his shuttle without incident, but the Transformers weren’t inside to greet them, armed to the teeth, cocooned from head to toe in impenetrable body armor. That wasn’t like them. They lived to intimidate.

  Assissi, Mentoros’s assistant administrator, gestured for his two aides to follow him—quietly. The two drones weren’t much on conversation anyhow. But they squeaked when they walked. He supposed they couldn’t do much about that.

  The sliding bay doors parted. If they’d taken a couple more seconds to do so Mentoros would have uttered the magic words from one of his childhood tales, see if that did the trick.

  He’d barely stepped across the threshold and he already wished the doors had never separated.

  Bodies laid everywhere, broken out of their armored cocoons like they’d exploded from the inside. Some corpses hung, stuck to the walls, dangling there by their dried blood and entrails. Others were suspended from the ceiling like streamers at a kid’s party, hanging from the hardened, dried blood and pulp of their exposed brains. He had no explanation for how the blood could have congealed that fast, take on a stickiness like tree sap. But then who knew what Transformers’ blood was made of, how it reacted under fire? Maybe the quick congealing was meant to keep them from bleeding out.

  The rest of the ship was the same.

  “Check the other ships, you two,” Assissi orde
red.

  The two droids ran off, back in the direction of the landing bay.

  By then Assissi was already combing through the video feeds of the other vessels, patched in through their COMMS. He could see for himself the crews were all dead. But he had to be thorough. The law mandated it in case even one was alive, who could tell the tale. Hell, anyone among the living would be tortured to get the information out of him if he couldn’t remember, couldn’t be hypnotized to remember, or in any other way cajoled to cough up the truth. If there was someone left alive, he’d soon wish he weren’t.

  Standing on the bridge, observing the desecration of the bodies, he hailed Mentoros on the surface, “You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Everyone dead?”

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  “Long story. But it looks like we have the beginning of our own space marines the next time those oligarch bastards show up.”

  “Who the hell is going to man these ships?” Assissi croaked.

  “They have autopilot functions, I’m sure. I guess they’ll have to man themselves for now, until we can think of something better.”

  “You expecting a war?” Assissi asked.

  There was dead air on the line. Finally Mentoros replied, “Yeah, a long, drawn out one. Only not with the oligarchs, as I’d hoped. Looks like we just got drafted into Leon DiSanti’s war to liberate everyone in all of creation.”

  This time the pause was at Assissi’s end. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me the rest of that story now.”

  “Yeah, sure. Get your ass down here.”

  “What about The Collectors, sir? Don’t you think they’ll have something to say about that? No one’s escaped this prison since the beginning of time.”

  “Tell him, darling,” Mentoros said as the six year old Myna that had briefed him earlier ran up to him.

  She took the COMMS from Mentoros. “No problemo.”

  ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE

  MENTAS GALAXY

  PAN-GALAXIA HEADQUARTERS ON CEREBRA

  Of late, Sopos had taken to sporting a form-fitting one-piece body suit not unlike Sonny’s Shadow Warriors’ elite Special Forces unit. He had a spry figure for a man his age, so it wasn’t like he couldn’t pull it off. But the true nature of the outfit had to do with the spider-thin exoskeleton that looked like so much silver decorative trim. That “decorative trim” connected to gaudy crystal bracelets and an even gaudier crystal necklace. The silver trim continued up both sides of his neck and connected to a band about his forehead whose centerpiece was yet another crystal.

  Ostensibly, the crystals were AIs that could spawn more spider-like exoskeletons, an entire army of them, each powered by a smaller, rapidly grown crystal, produced by the mother crystals decorating his body. That army was part of his latest protection detail. And, of course, the robot in repose that remained on him gifted him the augmented strength to flee or battle his way through any conflict as needed.

  Well known for his paranoia when it came to private protection, no one ever questioned the real reason for the outfit.

  The crystals, even more importantly, allowed him to further concentrate the power and influence of the psychic amplifying artificial moons in orbit around Cerebra, within the Pan Galactica meeting hall where he wished to sway his fellow voters.

  He paced the floor of the circular stage now, gazing up periodically at his fellow senators from the Mentas Galaxy sitting in the circular benches rising in rows about the theater in the round.

  Whatever planet in the Mentas Galaxy his fellow senators hailed from, they, like their people, shared one trait in common—their enlarged craniums. Some of those brains had elaborate armored encasings that their peoples had evolved by way of a protective exoskeleton, elaborate because the one-of-a-kind ridges tracing the skull plates looked almost decorative, or like tribal body piercings. Other senators had no such protection about their brains, which actually pulsed with life, some giving off a light show, others contracting like muscles in response to tension, or from communicating telepathically.

  The entire assembly was spying on a debate currently underway on Centros, which served as the planetary civic center for the Helldros Galaxy. Sopos was careful to skirt the hologram, in the shape of a rotating sphere, so as not to prejudice the senators’ thinking by blocking their views to any of the meeting participants being monitored.

  The Centros confluence of leaders included the oligarchs from the five Helldros galactic sectors. They had chosen the peak of the tallest mountain on Centros, which had been leveled at the top to accommodate in-flying helicopters, and planes which could be turned into helicopters by rotating their propellers.

  The five trans-genders, who were both sexes at once, and self-reproducing, to ensure a continuance of the oligarchs’ lineages without watering down their genes, or also risking watering down their fortunes acquired over lifetimes by marrying into less moneyed lineages in the event spouses of equal financial merit were unavailable, stood in a circle a respectful distance from one another.

  They spoke freely amongst themselves, convinced they were beyond prying eyes. But, in truth, one of Sopos’s cloaked psychic amplifying moons was already in orbit abut Centros, influencing their thinking.

  “I believe five of the six of us have been pondering defecting to the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping,” Veritas said, his tone less of a veiled warning than an out and out threat.

  One of the other oligarchs held out an arm an in assuaging manner. “We believe we have a proposal which will make you very happy,” Apassanty replied. “We plan to take a handful of worlds from each of our sectors, leaving you with the bulk of them to do with as you please.”

  “The ones we propose taking,” Daikin said, “are the rebels who would never have gone along with your plans. They have been impossible for us to mollify.”

  “Everything from psyops games to out and out warfare has failed,” chimed in Pacifica. “They are the planets set up as hostels, where we send our youth to be conditioned. But we were betrayed by hostel leaders who had another agenda in mind.”

  “Now,” added Ebony, “not only are these youths hardened against our cause, they are forever-youngs, having imbibed their cult cocktails that will keep them at various ages forever. Many are scarcely more than five or six years old. The eldest are eight or nine.”

  “You’re telling me you have no way of containing this insurrection short of dumping these worlds on the Gypsy Galaxy?” Veritas barked.

  “We saved the best for last,” Apassanty replied, this time holding his palm up, in a gesture communicating, “please stop.”

  “We have only recently learned the true nature of the subterfuge,” Daikin said. “These worlds are rich in a mineral known as mindrite.”

  “It turns anyone exposed to them into the ultimate psychic weapons,” Pacifica explained.

  “Think of them as terrorists wearing explosive vests,” Ebony clarified for Veritas. “On any world they are inserted on, their pacifist, peace-loving thinking spreads like a mind virus to any they encounter. They turn the entire world into a cult of zealots who cannot be talked down. The ones that cannot be converted to their way of thinking are psychically destroyed instantly—including the many space navies we’ve sent after them.”

  Veritas nodded. “So, it is your idea to infiltrate the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping with these children.”

  The others nodded sagely. “We don’t believe we have what it takes to thwart Gypsy Galaxy ambitions. But we can make the Gypsy Galaxy so useless to The Collectors, they will happily allow them to leave the Menagerie. And any galaxies thinking of going out the door behind them…Well that fantasy will have ceased the moment the mindrite crystal children put an end to his unstoppable war machine before it even got started.”

  The psychic amplifiers gave access to Veritas’s private thoughts, as well, to the assembly of senators about Sopos, on a planet far far away.

  Veritas was delighted by the idea of his fellow conspi
rator oligarchs, with some modifications, of course. The worlds would not be teleported into the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping, just the children. Why send one army of psychic warriors, when you could raise as many as you liked? Successive waves of children could be programmed the way he wanted, he was sure of that, even if these fools had failed at the task. Why risk the enemy turning that weapon against you, first to battle the already brainwashed children, then to battle the likes of Veritas.

  He saw through the ruse of his four fellow oligarchs, what’s more. They truly wanted to escape his oppression, volunteering to chaperone the worlds in question, replacing the youth hostel administrators with themselves.

  But as Veritas thought through the problem and how best to handle his turncoats, he grew increasingly paranoid. Such worlds could not be allowed to exist in Helldros. They could risk undoing everything Veritas had been working to accomplish for millions of years. Zealots of any kind were to be feared, even the ones brainwashed to believe what you wanted them to believe, because as his needs changed, he’d never be able to reprogram them.

  Veritas couldn’t explain the mounting pressure in his head or the rising sense of anxiety. But it seemed to be related to the size of the threat these mindrite-rich worlds possessed. Even as he sweated more profusely and struggled to loosen his collar against his bulging neck veins… Even as he hid his face flushing red and growing warm by turning his body away, ostensibly to check out the view of Centros from on high to help him think…He couldn’t escape the sway of Sopos’s psychic amplifiers, playing him like a fiddle.

  “Very well,” he said. “But how will you teleport these worlds into the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping?”

  “The Gypsy Galaxy has the technology,” Pacifica piped up.

  Veritas sighed, turned back to face the four oligarchs. “One more reason to sic those worlds on them. It may be the only play we have against such advanced technology.”

  The others nodded sagely, maintaining their mock façades for his benefit. Veritas would deal with them soon enough, once he was rid of those worlds. With any luck, by the time Leon DiSanti realized the nature of the problem, it would be too late to dump the worlds on somebody else.