Of course, he was busy ducking more than just robospiders. The 2nd generation Peacekeeper had deployed “cleansers” whose job it was to brush the hull clean of invaders by impolitely exploding in their faces. Other than shielding his eyes by turning away, Leon was making do with the husk of a dead spiderbot that Cassandra had dispatched, as a shield.
In another second she’d opened a hole big enough for them to breach.
Cassandra threw Leon inside and then brought herself aboard.
There had been no ship depressurization in their vicinity.
Leon found that odd. The distinct absence of atmosphere was another one for the wtf list. At the rate he was going he was going to exhaust his nanites’ abilities to meet his body’s needs in the absence of an atmosphere. It wasn’t like they could take a break when they were outside the ship.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Leon asked.
“No crew,” Cassandra said. “I’ve dispersed nanite hive mind clouds to find out what’s going on in all directions that don’t merely drift; they move like cyclones off an angry sea.”
They were speaking courtesy of the womb-like bubble-atmosphere their surface nanites were procuring for them. But the dynamic duo could have made do with mindchip to mindchip communication if that link failed.
“There’s no way this Peacekeeper would trust all of its defenses to its chief AI,” Cassandra said.
“No, this is something else. Get us out of here now, and pulse a signal to Mother.”
“What will I tell her?”
“To dispatch Chi Corps and Psi Force to our coordinates now,” Leon said, his eyes darting everywhere. He was fighting to keep his breathing regular.
“Do we even know what the hell they can do?”
“We’re sure as hell going to find out. Get us out of here now, I said! If I’m right, what’s coming at us next even you aren’t going to do much about.”
Cassandra never liked being told that. She clamped down on her jaw until her jaw muscles bulged. All the same, she kicked a hole open in the hull that the spiderbots outside had just mended.
A glowing blob shot past them.
Cassandra’s reflexes alone were fast enough to save them. She ducked and pulled Leon out of the way at the same time. “What the hell was that?” she shout-whispered.
“Ethereals. Why keep a humanoid crew aboard as backup when their Biosystems are slow to repair, even for nanites, in real time, when you can just possess the bodies of any breaching the ship?” Leon explained.
Cassandra sighed as the other shoe dropped for her. “And they can’t be targeted.” She barely had time to pull them out of the way as another darting poltergeist lit up like a flash of ball lightning.
Cassandra scanned the area. “There are more of them. A lot more.”
“I’m guessing the ship’s chief AI scanned you and upgraded its assessment of the threat we posed.”
The poltergeists were charging them from all directions.
There was no way they were dodging all of them at once, Leon didn’t care how fast Cassandra could move.
Chi Corps materialized. Teleporting in, no doubt, courtesy of Mother. Then again, who knew what these bastards could do on their own?
Chi Corps surrounded Cassandra and Leon.
To Leon’s surprise they looked every bit as humanoid as he did, only their bodies were painted in a chartreuse green light. And they were happy to play catch with the Peacekeeper’s Ethereals. Chi Corps’ bodies were comprised of pure chi energy. They were dialed into the chi grid undergirding all existence. Just like the human body had chakras and meridians and channels for chi to flow along, to sponge in and transmit chi flowing through a planetary body, so the cosmos had these chakras and energy meridians and energy conduits. They connected everything. When Yoda in Star Wars referred to feeling a disturbance in the Force halfway across the cosmos, he was using his energy body and his connection to that universal chi energy body to sense at a great distance. Leon was happy once again for his prolific sci-fi reading to help him get his mind around what was going on.
Chi Corps cadets had the same energy conduits in their bodies as Leon and Cassandra did. As to what allowed them to hold their body shapes—pure thought alone. The spirit, the soul, the energy imprint that left the body when it died, whatever you wanted to call it—that was the glue keeping them together.
Needless to say Chi Corps could do more with the chi flowing through them than Leon or even Cassandra. They demonstrated as much by trapping the poltergeists flowing into them within eddies and cross currents in their own energy bodies. Nodal points known as nadirs, where these energy channels crossed, became temporarily inflamed and engorged like lymph nodes in the human body when it was fighting off a virus or bacterial inflammation. It was Leon’s guess Chi Corps cadets could digest those poltergeists over time, using them as a supplemental energy source, when fighting prolonged battles in chi-poor regions of the universe, where they might be too far distant from energy veins moving chi through the cosmos. The Nautilus came equipped to handle such a situation; it had chi amplifiers built into the ship. But the 2nd-generation Peacekeeper? Who knew?
Cassandra, seeing Chi Corps starting to get overwhelmed—apparently there was only so much poltergeist absorption and deflection they could manage at once—kicked a wider hole in the hull and yanked Leon through, determined to get both of them in the clear.
But not before Leon witnessed Psi Force engaging.
The meditating Shaolin monks floated in midair, seated in a lotus position, their eyes closed, viewing everything through their third eyes, or 6th chakras in the center of their forehead.
They were projecting phantoms of their own at the poltergeists.
The screaming aboard the ship had already begun, like some haunted house come alive.
Those weren’t Leon’s people doing the screaming.
“Looks like we got us a 2nd generation Peacekeeper,” he said, smiling, confident that Chi Corps’ and Psi Force’s natural pairing would win the day for them. Though the confrontation between them and the Peacekeeper’s inner defenses was still in the early stages.
“Don’t be so thrilled with yourself. We can barely figure out what to do with a first generation Peacekeeper.”
“All in good time, Cassandra. Mother can only support so many Chi Corps cadets onboard the Nautilus with her chi amplifiers without having to find an energy node and parking herself there. But these 2nd generation Peacekeepers, with some reworking, assuming they can’t already support a vast crew of Ethereals…”
She shook her head slowly. “Thank Techa our enemies are legion. The day you run out of them, you’ll play your war games against yourself just to keep yourself amused. And then you really will lose.”
“You know what this means! We have new homes for Psi Force units as well, which will allow us to grow their numbers also.”
Cassandra frowned as she put two and two together for herself. “May as well pair them with Chi Corps on the 2nd-gen Peacekeepers. They seem to have a yin-yang dynamic going that puts ours to shame.”
“I’m sure you don’t mean that.”
“I’m sure if keeping you alive continues to be a fulltime job I might forget why I even bother to do it.”
“And I, ready to lay eternity before the feet of my queen.”
She chuckled, but this being Cassandra, it sounded like a more energetic sigh than normal. She showed him the whites of her eyes, but this time he couldn’t guess where she was deploying her long range scanners. He forgot sometimes she was every bit as weaponized as a spaceship, and often able to send probes even further into the cosmos. “Chi Corps and Psi Force units are deploying to the other 2nd generation Peacekeepers. They will be ours before The Collectors can even wake up to being duped. But it’s all for naught unless…”
“Unless Solo comes through for us.” Leon sighed. Solo. Just. What. Are. You. Up. To?
ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN
ABOARD THE NAUTIL
US
Solo had written the math that could—theoretically—allow for a construct like The Collectors’ nodal region—a way of taking a slice out of innumerable parallel universes and enclosing those portions within their own artificially constructed multiverse, all orbiting a black-hole like entity at the center. Only it wasn’t a black hole. It was more of a column than a sphere. Like folding a single tissue of space-time back on itself until both sides touched. It was an interesting take on an Einstein-Rosen bridge, to say the least.
As it turned out, according to the math, The Collectors had accessed other dimensions to pull off this trick, and navigating other dimensions was a forte for the rainbow-eyed Umbrage.
But they hadn’t done it in an obvious way.
It was factoring in for the cowardly temperament of The Collectors, the fact that they preferred to pull strings from a distance, without anyone knowing of their actual existence, which allowed Solo to make progress on this vexing problem at all. The Collectors were every bit as sneaky in their dealings with space-time as with other dimensions, as with sub-space, with what the Buddhists referred to as the Divine Ground—the void out of which all universes emerged—and all multiverses for that matter—like holograms.
The Collectors’ unique psychology had given rise to a unique mathematics for constructing a province that wasn’t entirely of space-time, wasn’t entirely out of it, where they thought no one could reach them.
The math was a mind bender because the equations had to hold for all of these nether regions. And no math had been written to describe more than one kind of space at a time. So Solo had to borrow what he could from them all, including what was known of black hole mathematics, borrowing from the recently deceased Stephen Hawking back on Earth. But Solo couldn’t just cobble together what he needed. Over eighty-percent of the math was his.
It would be up to Mother’s supersentience to engineer the device to open a door to the unreachable province of The Collectors.
“Mother?” Solo said, raising his voice, trying not to sound impatient, twirling his cane one way then the other in his hands as he paced.
“Activating the device now.”
She had barely had time to turn it on before The Collectors voices came over the Nautilus’s COMMS. They spoke as one, like some bizarre choral arrangement of dark angels. “You are free to go. Take your Gypsy Galaxy and your allies with you. We will not keep you. Take all the galaxies in the Menagerie if you like, just leave us with the prison.”
Leon’s voice came over the loudspeakers next. Solo figured Mother had patched him in immediately. It was the Leon that was aboard the Nautilus. Only Solo’s refined ears could tell the difference between them, echo-locating across space-time.
“You can keep the bulk of the galaxies you hold prisoners here. It occurs to me, they’re better off here than out there, raising havoc in the cosmos. Perhaps your Menagerie will serve them as a kind of nursery. For some people you can only get to heaven by way of hell. Hell is the incubator, the purifier of souls. And you’ve put our Lucifer, or at least our legends surrounding such an entity to shame with what you’ve created here.”
Leon took a moment to catch his breath. “But henceforth, you will imprison no galaxy or consortium of galaxies without my say so. You work for me now.”
There was silence as Leon waited for their answers.
“The other transgalactic civilizations and empires will not stand for this. We answer to them.”
“You leave them to me,” Leon said. “They haven’t figured out how to dismantle your little prison, I have. They don’t even know how to access it, or they’d have come to your rescue by now. If you requested such paltry defenses at the gates as a dozen second-gen Peacekeepers, it’s because you yourselves knew no more would ever be needed. And because you didn’t want to become a threat to them yourselves.”
“Then you’ve already figured out that all the legacy tech you’ve commandeered from the Menagerie will do you little good out there against the people that matter,” The Collectors replied, again, speaking as if one.
“My problem, not yours,” Leon said without hesitating. “The offer on the table has an expiration date of three seconds. Two. One.”
“We agree!”
Solo, smiling snakelike, was surprised the choral outburst hadn’t shattered Mother’s speaker system.
“Eject us now!” Leon said. “Before I change my mind.”
Or you change yours, Solo thought.
“We’re free,” Mother said to Solo, to Leon, to the entire Gypsy Galaxy and its allied galaxies in tow, moving through space as one now, courtesy of the moon artifact, whose origins remained as mysterious as ever.
Solo flinched, shutting down his psychic sensors. The outburst of excitement throughout the Gypsy Galaxy Grouping was too much to bear for his fine senses. So he tuned everyone out.
“How many galaxies came with, Mother?” Solo asked.
“Twelve.”
“So, with the Gypsy Galaxy, that makes thirteen.” Leon thought of Christ and the 12 disciples. But in more general numerological terms: the combination of the numbers 1 and 3 that comprised angel number 13 was a sign from your angels you were connected to the ascended masters and their ability to help you manifest your desires. Thirteen was the number that suggested keeping your focus on cosmic aspirations. How apropos.
“You may not think that in the days ahead, when the alliance begins to crumble in the absence of a common enemy,” Mother said, reading Leon’s mind.
“Yes,” Solo interjected, “Leon promised them profit from war mongering, and profit they will have, war they will have, or we’ll likely turn on one another like rabid dogs. Hardly an auspicious beginning, but I’ll take it.”
ACT SEVEN
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
DeWitt ran into Leon taking one of his constitutionals to decompress, strolling the hall about the inner courtyard of the ship from the other direction. DeWitt stopped to greet him. “Nice work with The Collectors, boss, getting us the hell out of there, I mean.”
Leon’s reaction to the compliment was not what he expected. Leon made a pained face and squinted as if his 20-20 vision was a thing of the past. “I’m sorry, I’ve got some timeline sickness from spending too much time in that tank. Wasn’t so noticeable when everything relied on people doing their jobs efficiently, and job skills carried over, but when it comes to this more personal stuff… Which DeWitt are you again? Are you the one with the wife and three kids? Or the one divorced five times over, paying alimony out the ass, gifting his wives entire planets just to keep them from taking out hits on him?”
DeWitt blanched. “Don’t even joke like that, man. That’s so not funny. One wife. One kid, Thor, yay high,” he gestured for emphasis, “determined to make sure the documentary of his life can be done in a series of comics without compromising the truth one bit.”
Leon hesitated and his eyes lost focus, as if he was rummaging through the rolodex in back of his mind. “Yeah, that’s right. You did well yourself, kid. Keep up the good work.” Leon squeezed DeWitt’s right shoulder affectionately and shook him.
***
DeWitt seemed to disappear for a moment when Leon put his hand on his shoulder to give him an attaboy. Leon rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t the first lapse.
“You alright, boss?” DeWitt asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be fine. Go get in some R&R while you can. Things never stay boring around me for too long.”
DeWitt laughed. “That’s one order you don’t have to give me twice. I’m sure the wife and kids would like to spend some time with me.” As he was walking off, he added, “Hey, nice job with getting us clear of The Collectors, by the way.”
Leon observed DeWitt disappearing in the distance. “Didn’t he just say that already? I’m not the only one suffering from shell shock around here. That was a prison break to end all prison breaks.”
; ***
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
IN ANOTHER TIMELINE
DeWitt entered his private suite, shouting for his wife even before the sliding doors could finish parting. “Corin!”
When his eyes finally landed on a subject of interest, his throat ran dry.
Crawling over the ridge of the sofa was a toddler, about to fall off any minute.
On the floor, on his back, was an infant lying on a baby blanket, rattle in hand, shaking it just loud and hard enough to get it to skip to the next sound in the revolving wheel of sound selections, which wasn’t a rattle; it was a police siren. The play selection after that were the sounds of dive bombing kamikaze planes, moments before the crash—the crashes were included in the loop.
DeWitt’s mouth was officially open wide enough now to dock any one of those kamikaze planes safely.
Corin walked in from the side room, carrying a load of laundry. Took one look at the toddler about to fall to his death, dropped the basket, ran over and scooped him up. She glared at her husband. “What the hell is wrong with you? Rocco could have died! And don’t give me any of that PTSD shit. You haven’t seen action for three months. I saw to that. You’re mine until the smallest one is fourteen. No more action for you.”
Despite the lack of saliva in his throat, DeWitt managed, “You have complete control over my life?”
“Like you know what the hell to do with it.”
“Leon would never agree to that.” Due to a certain feebleness in DeWitt’s voice, the last phrase broke up as if there was static on the line.
“So long as Leon needs me to design next-gen weapons and bioengineer him supersoldiers that won’t keep falling in battle, more than he needs you with your squirt pistol out in the field, you bet your ass he’ll continue to agree to it.”
Moving Earth Page 110
