Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

  Machia was a giant of a man, not just every muscle rippling but every muscle fiber, as if he had never slackened his combat training in order to devote more time to his leadership duties. And he was dressed in a way that would have done Spartans proud—suggesting that this alien race may indeed have inspired Sparta once upon a time on Earth as perhaps Pan-Galaxia had inspired Athens—if there was anything to those ancient alien visitor theories. What had begun as an idle analogy in Sonny’s head…

  His mind back on track, Sonny realized that he might well have enough powers-that-be under this thumb now with the Jardarians on board to check Leon, possibly even crush him. Sonny sat atop, what’s more, yet another hidden space armada inside each of the cloned Origine worlds. He had super-thinker consortiums he could bend to his will in the form of the Mentas. Also now under Sonny’s influence: Supersentiences like the gas giant Gamora, linked to yet others that might well check Mother’s abilities and then some.

  But the ultimate showdown with Leon was a long way off. Sonny could well imagine scenarios that could play out that would allow for Leon to crush Sonny’s uprising. What if Solo were to download the genetic secrets to Mother of The Guardian species he represented? Each color in the rainbow of just the Guardian race Solo belonged to, if repopulated to even a fraction of their original numbers, the entire color spectrum brought on board… Could anyone check the powers of the Guardians besides other Guardian species? Where were all those other Guardian species? Maybe if the Shadow Warriors continued to make inroads with finding them… And Sonny could win them over to his way of thinking… Even so, what about the ones above the heads of even the Guardians that no one still had any inkling about? No one knew their agenda either. And if Leon was the hand carrying out their will, unwittingly or not, and Sonny should go against him, Sonny didn’t like his chances one bit.

  No, his Shadow Warriors would have to spread far and wide, infiltrate far more networks reaching well beyond The Collectors’ Menagerie before Sonny chose to test the limits of Leon’s patience. A few testy rebellions and coups now and then between them, like this one occurring during Leon’s prison break would be what passed as spats between good friends.

  But the day would come, some day, for the real showdown.

  It was just in their respective natures to knock heads.

  Maybe that too had been factored in to The Guardians’ agenda, or the players operating above even them. Time would tell.

  ***

  Machia shook Sonny’s hand, and crushed it. “Sorry about that. It’s easy to forget how fragile you non-warrior classes are.”

  “No problem.” Sonny winced and waited patiently for his hand to regain shape with the help of his nanites.

  “So, young man…”

  Young man? Sonny knew he looked older than this guy. Was this race also immortal, or simply far more long-lived? What a piece of intel not to have reached him—and what a coup. Hard to come up against that kind of experience built up over such a span of time.

  “You’ve managed to take Jardaria by storm, all with the aid of your psychic amplifying moons paired with clones of Cerebra, no less. Impressive.”

  How the hell did he know about either?

  “Your effort to pair the thinking of an Athens Greece with the warrior class we Spartans are—to use your own analogies—offers to make us stronger, not weaker. Interesting. I gather that is the proposition you have for me today. How to co-evolve from here on out to avoid mutual destruction.”

  Not exactly, but the wry smile on Machia’s face suggested he might well be able to get out from under Sonny’s grip. If the strongest-minded among them were to swim upstream of the influence of the psychic amplifiers, raid and take over those worlds…Sonny should have known to have more contingency plans in play when coming up against a race of master strategists.

  “We choose the co-evolve option. Leon, master of war games that he is, and a worthy adversary for me, upon leaving the Menagerie and facing a larger operating theater out there… Well, he will either have to clone himself many times over or rely on Jardaria which can bring more diversity to war gaming than any number of clones of him could hope to do.”

  Sonny had to take a moment to catch up to Machia’s thinking, ironically, considering it was Sonny that had been planning this moment for some time, but when he did, both men smiled at one another.

  “If I know Leon,” Sonny said, “he will release the Klash in any initial wave of attacks. They have so many ways of being reborn to fight on to frustrate and bedevil the enemy, and to last long enough to expose their war gaming methods. Once you’ve had a chance to study them…”

  Machia nodded, “The Rippa, the RamRadden, and the rest of his fighting forces will be ours to direct how we wish.”

  “The less he has to intervene to correct for shortcomings in your thinking…”

  “The more time he has to expand theaters of operation further, allowing him to fight any number of wars with any number of galaxies, TGCs, TGEs, even universes…so long as Jardaria never runs out of generals.”

  “I can’t see how you would, since you have a galaxy full of them.”

  Both men chuckled. “Strange how things work out. Always surprises, even for men such as us.”

  Not one to overstay his welcome or squelch a deal by over-talking it, Sonny took a step back, bowed to him respectively, and started beaming out.

  “God I love being me!”

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY

  Damadus, the RamRadden fleet commander, winced in pain. The RamRadden fleet was in retreat from the Gypsy Galaxy, per the recently negotiated treaty with the Cream, Farsi. But Damadus could tell from the demons running rampant through his mind that The Collectors were having no part of it.

  Tough.

  He could handle a few demons.

  The Collectors must have been desperate to try a tactic like this. If there was one thing you learned fast about the RamRadden it’s that tell any of their people not to do something and they’ll make sure to do it.

  He was standing at the lip of the meeting room high up in the trees where he’d made the deal with Farsi and Sacrin. The wrap-around deck surrounding a most ancient tree that ran for over a mile into the sky was covered by branches, but otherwise entirely open to the environment.

  His eyes surveyed the skies.

  The RamRadden ships, among the first to return, were only now arriving back into the atmosphere of this world. Some of the ships were falling out of the sky and going up in flames, signs that the pilots were wrestling with their own sentient ships. Other faltering vessels turned against their own people.

  But the attrition rate was low.

  As far as Damadus was concerned, The Collectors were just culling the weak from the herd. They were doing the RamRadden a favor. The next time any bastard tried anything against the RamRadden, they’d get an even hardier response.

  It was time to reassure his people.

  Damadus leapt from the edge of the veranda, briefly enjoying the sense of freefall. He’d always enjoyed it, but today it was providing respite from the noxious brew of negative emotions and fears The Collectors were saturating his brain with.

  Even as images percolated through his mind of the annihilation of the RamRadden—the cost of making this decision to enter a treaty with Leon Disantis, and of trusting Farsi—he reveled in the moment.

  Damadus’s living ship, self-assembling about him, would have a unique design. Damadus meant to enter Gypsy Galaxy territory to serve as a beacon for his people, to reassure him that ignoring The Collectors was the path to greatness and glory. Very few would need this assurance. Most already understood that those who would mess with their heads had greater fears of their own regarding the people they were threatening, and they would draw strength and boldness from that knowledge.

  But once in space, he would psychically sense the ones who were faltering, and end them himself before they could do any damage to the RamRadden heroes. Once again, there was little to worry
about here as the RamRadden didn’t have many cowards hiding among their ranks. Of those, most were likely spies. And after today none would be left at all.

  On his way out of the planet’s atmosphere, Damadus gave brief thanks to the planet’s consciousness which responded to his request, growing the ship he needed around him with nothing more than the countless bacteria, fungi, and microbes and atmospheric aerosols at her command, all interlinked into a superintelligence.

  He reminded himself that he might have some trouble recognizing his own people, as each constructed a body made entirely out of their imaginations, and made real by the planetary consciousness itself. As for Damadus’s body, he’d gone with an skeletal frame made of petrified wood, and filled in the cavities with moss and slime molds whose cross-signaling capacities served as his brain distributed throughout his head and body. Really, the only way for him to know his own people was by his psychic connection to the planetary consciousness. It had yet to fail him; let’s hope it wasn’t about to start.

  Of course, he should have been smart enough not to make this blunder, because as soon as he acknowledged the importance of retaining a connection to the planetary consciousness, The Collectors were all too eager to use it as fodder for their latest experiments on his mind.

  Again, no worries.

  This was how they raised their own children, to teach them how to withstand the sway of The Collectors from day one.

  ***

  RIPPA HIGH COMMAND CENTER – SOL STATION

  The shields weren’t holding. They had been engineered to keep interlopers out, yes. They had been designed to be immune to intense solar radiation coming from the center of the sun, to say nothing of the pressures. But most of all, they had been designed to cancel out emissions from The Collectors. The way they had of getting inside a person’s head along any number of radio frequencies.

  The Rippa high command shrieked and writhed and shapeshifted across the floor of the colossal station, from inside whatever spaceship prototypes they were engineering, or from atop of them. The shapeshifting was intended to help them find a body-type suitable to minimizing the penetration of their minds by The Collectors. Not knowing what frequencies were hitting them, they first had to isolate those signals, then design the wave cancellation technology right into their bodies. Each of the five Rippa high command officers in the station came upon a different solution using algorithms designed to maximize on finding unique paths to desired ends.

  Even so, the pain they felt remained unremitting, only dialed down just enough now to allow them to think.

  Images of viruses sweeping through the Rippa, putting an end to their shapeshifting, compromising their aptitudes for developing war machines, permeated their minds.

  But the Rippa had evolved as a synthetic lifeform prizing logic above all, precisely as a defense against The Collectors’ ability to play on emotions. So The Collectors could only elicit so much panic in them. But even logic circuits could be compromised by stinking thinking. Complex, interlinked paranoid ideas could be constructed into cathedrals of thought, all masquerading as well-reasoned philosophies. All the while, the logic apparatus entirely unaware it was corrupted.

  The Rippa couldn’t withstand this assault for long.

  But they didn’t have to.

  Logic suggested that The Collectors were bluffing. That the Rippa retreat from Gypsy Galaxy space, their refusal to engage the enemy, was what had weakened The Collectors to such a degree as to make this assault necessary.

  Besides, the Rippa had one more thought to placate them. Farsi had promised to come through for them, to release the Red Umbrage on any Rippa whose otherwise unassailable logic had been compromised. And she would already be steering them toward a future that required minimal intervention from her to see that the Rippa prospered; she was just too highly in demand to micromanage anyone. And the Rippa did not like to be micromanaged, not after thousands of years of being subjugated by The Collectors.

  Still crumbling under the relentless assault against their every defense, their every rationalization that things were going to be okay, the Rippa played their final card.

  They climbed into the escape pods designed to teleport each of the high command council members to the far corners of the Rippa Galaxy. That way The Collectors could not focus all their mind power on any one spot. The Collectors would be forced to disperse it, reducing the intensity of the assault on any Rippa high council member’s mind.

  The teleportation feat, and their scattering like seeds in the wind, accomplished, Axis 5, one of the five council members who were known simply as Axis 1, Axis 2, Axis 3, Axis 4, and Axis 5, breathed more easily. He could feel the lessening of emotional static on his logic circuits. There would be only one thing to do now from their remote outposts: if the pressure remained too much, shut down their minds. The Collectors couldn’t influence brain signals that weren’t transmitting. Later, when the prison break was accomplished, they could reboot their minds. Axis 5 sent the transmission to the others, so they knew what was to be done, if they hadn’t landed on this solution for themselves already.

  The Rippa and the RamRadden, in accordance with the peace treaty agreed to with Farsi, had been withdrawing from Gypsy Galaxy space for some time now. The sheer number of fleets to be recalled was the only thing that had caused that pullback to take this long. So why had The Collectors waited until now to act? The only logical reason was a comforting one: they had more fires to put out than they could from their increasingly weakened state.

  What a lovely idea to shut his mind down to.

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE

  TOROS - A GYPSY GALAXY WORLD

  The Klash had been assigned the task of taking over the Gypsy Galaxy like only they could, colonizing every world in record time and spreading their progeny across the land like the plague. Their genetic nature afforded them almost instant adaptability to any habitat; their shapeshifting abilities meant that no adversaries endemic to any world would remain a worthy adversary for long; the Klash could simply morph on demand to satisfy whatever was required to repulse the most vicious predators.

  They were loyal to a fault to their supreme leaders and their supreme leaders lived for nothing but conquest; that meant no amount of right-thinking on Leon’s part, and war gamesmanship was ever going to get a Klash to willingly turn from enemy to ally.

  How then had things gone so wrong?

  As one of Sonny’s Shadow Warriors this was no idle question. Maxus had been sent here to keep an eye on developments, and should the Klash do the unthinkable—and go back on their agreement with Sonny to rape, pillage, and subjugate the entire Gypsy Galaxy—then it was Maxus’s job to find a way to sabotage things.

  Regrettably for Sonny, someone had done the unthinkable vis-à-vis Sonny—found a loophole in his thinking. And so it was now that a cloned Saran moon world was now in orbit around a Klash colonized Gypsy Galaxy planet. So now, instead of being slavishly loyal to their supreme leaders, the Klash were slavishly following whichever dictates the moon world telepathically broadcasted into their heads. It was a full-proof Sonny strategy, all right, only directed against Sonny instead of working for him.

  How could this be? As brilliant as Leon was, he had his hands full. It was highly likely he was barely aware of the Klash invasion, far less to what extent it had progressed. Solo? Mother? Someone else in his brain trust? Whoever was responsible for this turnaround the only countermeasure Maxus could divine currently was for Sonny to likewise decentralize his leadership. That was one message he did not want to take back to Sonny, considering how poorly delivering bad news had gone for Faceless—the guy now missing his face—as if the name didn’t say it all.

  No, Maxus had to come up with an on-site solution, something he could do to fix things. But what?

  Damn. Maxus couldn’t believe his eyes. The Klash had dropped in the form of seeds from the sky like some cloud seeding gone awry. The instant the seeds made contact with the soil they sprouted legs, b
urrowed into the earth and shortly thereafter miniature Klash soldiers started tunneling back out of the ground. The nanite-enriched seeds had already figured out how to build Klash warriors from whatever was on hand in the mud, wind, and waters of this planet. They continued growing to full size while on the march.

  They were soon sparring amongst themselves to determine the range and durability of these new bodies and to make ongoing improvements to them.

  Local creatures moving in for the attack, eager for a new food supply, did not like what they were coming up against. And by the time they’d turned tail to run it was too late. Any advantages the predators had that gave them the first strike advantage had already been whittled away by the rapid morphing ability of the Klash, already incorporating the strengths of their enemies into their own makeup. Damn. No one wanted to fight these guys, no one, and Maxus was getting a first row seat vantage point as to why. But still he had no answers to his conundrum: how the hell was he supposed to contain this burgeoning Klash stronghold now turned against Sonny by the psychic amplifier moon in the sky?

  Damn that transmitter. Maxus could feel the vice clamping down on his brain the longer he tried to resist. Why hadn’t Sonny thought to make his own people less pliable before the Saran moon world thought projectors? Had he planned to use them against his own people if it came to that? Maybe this time Sonny’s paranoia or his control freak nature or both would be his end. Because as naturally resistant as his Shadow Warriors were to brainwashing—it was just part of their spies’ toolkit—there was no withstanding those transmitters. Soon Maxus’s personal rebellion would be thwarted and he’d be another Leon fanboy and Sonny would have no one to blame but himself. Or was that nonchalant attitude he was now taking already a sign of the moon’s influence taking its toll?

  Even if all of Sonny’s other sabotage projects vis-à-vis all the other possibly turncoat humanoid races in the alliance went off without a hitch, it honestly wouldn’t matter now. If he couldn’t check the Klash, there was no denying how checkmated Sonny was.