Moving Earth: Space Cowboys, #2

By Dean C. Moore

The artifact on the moon was supposed to move the Earth to safety, away from attacking alien civilizations. That was the theory put forth by Natty Young, the Nikola Tesla of his times, who found the artifact buried on the moon and dated the obelisk back several billion years. The species that put it there were henceforth known as The Guardians.

 

But Natty was wrong.

 

When the artifact activates, Earth and its people are catapulted into an intergalactic war, far away from their home galaxy. Even with the help of the super-sentient Nautilus starship, Earth's chances of surviving this predicament are less than zero.

 

But the intergalactic war is just the tip of the iceberg floating atop a much deeper, darker mystery. When the truth is finally revealed, Leon, the ever-dauntless leader of all Special Forces units, armored by his surrender-is-never-an-option mentality, collapses right in front of his Special Forces men and women. Never a good sign.

 

Was the artifact on the moon meant to be a Trojan horse all along? Was it hacked? Or are they being parented by a several-billion-year-old civilization tired of coddling? So many questions, not enough answers, and not nearly enough time.

 

OTHER OMEGA FORCE AND ALPHA UNIT NOVELS:

 

THE STAR GATE (SPACE COWBOYS 1)

MIND OF A CHILD: SENTIENT SERPENTS

 

note: all Omega Force and Alpha Unit novels are standalones, with complete story arcs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean C. Moore
• Release date: Jun 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9798215226759

Book preview

Omega Force, Alpha Unit, Theta Team

And now:

Chi Corps, Psi Force, Gamma Group

And others

and Sonny and his spies and assassins:

The Shadow Warriors

And chief among the Alien Species:

THE COLLECTORS

THE GUARDIANS

And chief among the AIs:

The Sentient Starship

THE NAUTILUS

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Dean C. Moore.  All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. 

The boldest measures are the safest.

Lord Nelson

ACT ONE

MOVING EARTH

ONE

HARDING COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

Dad, the stars aren’t right.

Dillon had a genius IQ and an eidetic memory. But what he was proudest of was his familiarity with the stars. He’d memorized every constellation in every hemisphere of Earth’s sky by the age of three. By six he was sending in recommendations regarding other constellations to NASA because his pattern recognition abilities were just that good.  For the hundreds of additional constellations he argued for adding to the charts—all entirely ignored by NASA, of course, despite his impeccable six-year-old reasoning—entire astrological societies were named after him. Now that he was in his 30s, his fan mail bordered on the oppressive. Every astronomer on earth wanted his opinion on everything, from a planet they were sure was a planet and not an asteroid—despite what NASA said—to a slight warble in the photographed light of a sun that some astronomer was certain was a Dyson sphere.

Hailey, his eleven-year-old daughter, couldn’t identify every constellation in the sky until she was four and a half. But she was a relative moron with her 170 IQ. It was a hush-hush matter between them that they were determined to keep from her mother. Her mother was hoping for an IQ of 130, so they could possibly have a conversation once in a while. Dillon was teaching Hailey how to talk dumb; she found it harder than Mandarin.

Suffice to say when Hailey said something was off about the stars, he took her seriously and gazed heavenward.  Also, suffice to say, if there was anyone qualified to correct her, it was her dad, Dillon.

Shit! Someone has moved the planet.

Dad, don’t swear. Besides, what you’re suggesting is quite impossible with current technology. Mind you, if they decide to act on my proposal for moving the entire solar system out of the way of incipient black holes, we could talk turkey.

Dillon racked his mind for an explanation.  Nothing. There were times when a 200 IQ just wasn’t enough.  Come on, honey, we have to run. He dragged Hailey along by the arm like a limp rag doll children run with, forgetting they have it in their hand.

Dad, really? Could we at least run through the more mundane explanations first before assuming the worst?

Like?

Group psychosis.

The spirulina power shake we had was spiked with acacia, Dillon acknowledged, "but if it were that good, they’d be selling it on every corner for the cost of a diamond ring from Tiffany’s."

A military weapon then that screws with the mind they’re experimenting with, Hailey suggested, and we’re among the guinea pigs. It’s easier to lock up people who sound mad, especially people like us, where they can continue to pick our brains.

I like it. It’s a down-to-earth theory, entirely in keeping with your mother’s gene pool, and it’s probably the best rational explanation. But it’s dead wrong.

How can you know? Hailey squawked.

Because I know things, okay? They found an artifact on the moon. Natty Young—the Tesla of our times—noticed it was firing up. One of his theories regarding its purpose was for...

Moving Earth! Hailey exclaimed, refusing to fall more than one step behind Dillon’s reasoning or his running.  Those messages between Omega Force and Alpha Unit and Natty were quantum encrypted. I thought only the Chinese and I had a way around Quantum encryption.

In Dillon’s panicked run he still managed to throw a glance back her way. Glad to see my rebel gene pool wasn’t entirely suppressed by your mother.

"Did you catch the bit about the cloaked spaceship in orbit—the Nautilus, built under the ocean of Europa, far away from prying eyes—tasked with protecting Earth? By Natty’s father, no less?"

He glared at his daughter while counting off large striding steps to the car, embarrassed really, since he could geo-track himself relative to any block in Shanghai, China down to the correct number of paces. But he tended to get dumb when he was this panicked. His wife couldn’t wait for his next panic attack so they could finally have a conversation she didn’t mind being a part of.  I’m your father. I’m supposed to shelter you from these ugly realities until you’re older and you can deal with them better.  A 170 IQ is no panacea for a lack of emotional maturity.

And maybe you thought I was going to deal with moving the Earth to an unrecognizable star system better by reading more Nancy Drew.

You read Nancy Drew over Star Wars? Are we even related? He ripped the car door open, threw her inside.

Dad! Ow! She rubbed her right shoulder from the front passenger seat. I think you dislocated my shoulder.

Sorry, he said, turning the engine over with the press of a button. He craned his head to her as she slammed herself against the door again with a scream to force her arm back into the shoulder joint.  His jaw fell slack; it was disturbing how much better his daughter was at surviving the end of the world than he was. We’ve got to get to ground—I mean underground, he declared, realizing how flustered he sounded.

For the impending alien invasion, you mean? She checked for the realization in his eyes. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I mean, why else move the planet? Something mighty scary is coming our way and fast.

He kept shaking his head slowly. Your mother is never going to be able to process this.

You leave her to me.

TWO

HARDING COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

I hate to break it to you, Dad, but it’s probably time to rethink the whole convertible idea.

Dillon, having put two and two together regarding the relocated planet long ago, and panicking—like any sane person—realized his IQ had plummeted like a seesaw as his anxiety level rose, which made it hard to track Hailey’s thinking right now.

Hailey’s inevitable sigh followed next. Look up, Dad!

Dillon regarded the sky—and the hailstorm of fiery meteors headed their way. I’m guessing Earth is no longer one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the universe.

The impacts in the distance from the hurtling meteors, though still far enough away, shook the ground beneath them. Dillon fought with the steering wheel even as he gawked at the near blinding explosions.  Looking on the positive side, I was wondering how the hell I was going to drive along these dark twisty roads with the busted headlamps.

You’re getting too good at ignoring Mom when she orders you to fix the car. Though I suppose it’s a moot point now.

He had to veer suddenly as a piece of asteroid impacting a little closer created an avalanche heading their way. They sped along under falling rocks and boulders and his swerving wildly was looking more and more like crackerjack driving at a demolition derby. We’ll never survive this meteor storm.

Hate to break it to you, Dad, but living through this avalanche is looking even more problematic.

The tires squealed, the engine roared, the gears ground, the fenders and bodywork screeched like only rending metal could with each grazing impact of slate and granite, and Dillon’s arms were already getting too sore to maintain the timely dodges much longer.

Not to kick a guy when he’s down, but there’s no way this is a natural phenomenon, Hailey insisted, staring at the sky. Two seconds after moving the planet to a new location this happens? I don’t think so. That artifact on the moon... I think we can forget the idea that it was put there to save us. It’s there to spare the attacking army the resources needed to dispatch us. They get to conserve munitions, and commence the attack without even being in the vicinity. Don’t get me going on what kind of technology it takes to hurtle asteroids at someone. Though they could have done that from our solar system, so something more is going on here.

What did I tell you about extrapolating wildly in the presence of insufficient evidence?

He realized he sounded madder at her than at the thundering boulders trying to squish them underneath like the roadkill they were destined to be. The latest impact was a little more than grazing.

It sent the car rolling down the incline.

Now the truth was, he’d gone with a classic convertible because, at  6’ 4" he didn’t fit into most modern cars, not even most antique ones, not comfortably anyway. It had been a logical choice at the time, though many would choose to fault his reasoning now. Add the fact that he had a gaunt figure and, with his thick head of shiny black hair and chiseled features, could pass for Michael Rennie in the 1955 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still in a pinch, making him look taller still, and it made Hailey all the less desirous of standing next to him; instead of looking eleven, she looked nine. She loved the convertible because it was far easier to ignore how tall he was in it, until he had to lean into her to keep from losing his head.

The rolling car mocked Hailey’s decision to keep her straight black hair long, whipping it across her face mercilessly, to say nothing of her prim and proper attire that she took pride in. But her piercing blue eyes seemed to see through everything, including the dust and debris floating in the air.

Hailey waited for the black convertible to settle—miraculously, wheels up and both windshield and windshield frame intact—before laying into him.  The seatbelts neither of them could remember putting on, judging by how they regarded the band at their waists, had held, along with their ducking reflexes. Dad, you need to get the car in motion again.

Can’t we just rest here a while? My arms are sore.

She looked at the rock slide which had not stopped at the ribbon of road above them, but was continuing their way, and rolled her eyes. God help me if I have to manage both of my parents at the same time. Move over, she said.

Dillon didn’t argue. He just elbowed the driver side door until it opened, and came around the other side of the car, by which time Hailey was already in the driver’s seat. He was fighting with his dinged and damaged door.  I bet you appreciate the classics better now. Let’s see a modern car take a roll like that with barely a scratch! He was making no progress with the door no matter how hard he beat himself against it.

Dad, just climb over the door.

Oh, yeah.

She ripped open the dashboard, exposing the wiring, mumbling, Anyone who says IQ is not compromised by stress level has clearly never met my father.

What are you doing? he asked.

I’m hacking the car’s auto-pilot, which you should have thought to engage before your intelligence eroded so completely you didn’t remember the car came with the feature.

It’s a 1971 Ford LTD!

"With all the necessary end-of-the-world features installed. Give me some credit, Dad. She checked his clueless face. And there goes the eidetic memory, too. You still remember your name, Dad?"

That’s not very charitable. Apologize to your father for being so unkind.

Hailey groaned before realizing he was right. Sorry, Dad. And I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the hysterically screaming, age-appropriate, eleven-year-old you so clearly deserve, not with the way my parents carry on.

What did I tell you about the piling on?

Hailey ignored him that time, making flustered sounds with the forest of wiring she was trying to finger-crawl her way through.

What’s the holdup? he asked.

I think the autopilot is having an emotional breakdown.

Seems to be going around.

It wasn’t designed for this, Hailey informed him. For some reason no one thought to include a driving-under-landslides-feature in the end-of-the-world package. A hell of an oversight, if you ask me.

Her dad craned his head upwards at the latest rocks coming their way.  I don’t mean to rush you.

Hailey saw a boulder skip over her and her father, trapped in the LTD, that shouldn’t have missed them; she’d analyzed its bouncing trajectory. I swear I can’t tell if it’s the patron saint of overnight idiots looking out for us, or the patron saint of 1971 Ford LTDs.

The car started with the autonav AI engaged and lurched forward. The AI made sure, from the get go, to outdrive her father to crush what was left of his fragile ego. 

She handed him the laptop keyboard that she’d wired to the car’s AI. Keep typing soothing admonitions to the AI like ‘You can do it!’ ‘I believe in you!’ God knows you could benefit yourself from verbalizing a few of those affirmations.

Her father gasped as if he’d been running a marathon all this time. Yeah, I can do that.

See, the medicine is working already. Now you know what to do when your mind gets so small you have no choice but to slither out of the tight spot like a snake.

Thata boy! he said as he typed the words into the car’s AI. All he had to do for motivation to keep keying was look up at the road periodically and realize that there was no way they could still be alive—not if he was driving.

Noticing his seatbelt frayed from more than sixty years of atrophy and too much being asked of it at too late a date, Dillon grabbed the passenger side handle to keep from being thrown from the car with the latest corrective driving maneuver. That didn’t stop him from typing one-handed, Yea! At least he had the sense to shorten the pep talks to what he could manage with one hand.

Hailey continued to assess the situation.  I predict we will make it home, providing we survive this landslide. The meteor shower is too dispersed. This is meant to be a planet-killing event, not a local area wipeout, if that can be taken as good news.

Chin up, darling. Takes more than sticks and stones...

She was prepared to be good and irritated by his dumb remark when it struck a nerve. Wait, you’re right! Whoever is sending those asteroids our way can’t just be throwing them willy-nilly.  They have to be targeted precisely enough to take out key installations: missile silos, communications centers, satellites, underground bases, to properly dismantle Earth’s defenses. She whistled.

I rescind what I said about sticks and stones. I don’t appreciate you turning a hundred or more years of cliché misuse on its head like that, little girl!

It took him a while to digest the more salient point of their argument, but he did so eventually. "Wait, why such targeted hits? Enough untargeted bombardment will break this planet apart entirely."

Well, technically, you’re right and I’m overreaching again. But it wouldn’t take technology this advanced simply to destroy our world. Anyone that can move a planet at will to God knows where, can just as easily blow it up. No, the aliens want us, or our resources, or something.

The car’s self-driving AI had managed to get them free of the rock avalanche at last. Ironically, the view of the meteor strike continued to improve as they moved out into the flats. It’s so beautiful, her dad said.

Hailey sighed. If you’re trying to outdo yourself for daftness, Dad, please, for my sake, don’t try so hard.

They drove in silence, taking in the spectacle in the sky. Her father started to rub his back from what all the earth tremors were doing to his spine. He had cervical issues on a good day. He continued to shower praise at the car’s AI through his keyboard as sections of road split and tore like chapped lips in cold weather—more repercussions of the distant meteorite impacts.

It doesn’t make any sense, Hailey said, staring at the sky.

What doesn’t?

For my theory about the precision targeting to be correct, there’d have to be something worthwhile around here to blow up. But we’re not near any strategic installations; I saw to it as part of the whole end-of-the-world preparedness thing.

You know we were just humoring you, right, because as it turns out small town living is the best a disgraced professor could afford.

She glared at him, but not for the reason he would have expected, had he been looking.

But Dillon was fully immersed in his pep talk with the car’s AI, answering her only absently. The therapy might be working on him nearly as well as on the car; both seemed noticeably calmer, judging by the car’s driving and his breathing.

She returned her eyes to the sky.  If our strategic assets are of no threat to them—and I don’t see how they could be—maybe this is more of a psyops game, meant to demoralize more than destroy.

Her father gazed at the sky and grimaced. Mission accomplished. I’d surrender to a talking toilet at this point.

Your talking toilet has been telling you to get checked out before your polyps turn into cancer for the last two years. Did you listen? No. Maybe God works in mysterious ways.

Ha, ha! he said absently, continuing to hammer plaudits at the car’s AI, the latest one being, I can’t believe what you just did! Genius! The car had swerved about the latest rip in the road by going up on two wheels briefly.

Of course the fact that he’d caught her joke at all, especially listening to her only absently, suggested he may indeed be on the recovery trail.  She’d settle for any coping mechanism that got him through this so he wasn’t total dead weight. But more than anything, she needed his brain back online—and not just in bits and measures.

This war could be over by then.

On the plus side: convincing her mother she wasn’t catastrophizing because the stars didn’t look right just got a lot easier.

The thought hadn’t flown into her head unbidden.  They were drawing up to their home.

Hailey could see her mother seated on the stoop, calmly drinking coffee, and staring up at the sky.  It was the kind of unflappable reaction she was not looking for. If that was a psychotic break, Hailey was about to truly regret skipping her psych homework. The kind of scientists she expected to spend the rest of her life around were painfully dull, by and large. They did not walk around as poster children for DSM-5 diagnoses. Well, barring that beautiful mind guy that taught at Princeton.

The car pulled up to the curb and shut off right in front of her mother, who glanced at them, smiled, and waved.  Isn’t the meteor shower simply beautiful?

Hailey sighed. Great, just great.

Dillon finally glanced up at Hailey, finding her still glaring wide-eyed at him. What?

I figured out why the asteroids are impacting us in the absence of strategic assets in the area. It’s you, Dad. You’re the greatest cosmological physicist the world has ever known. You’re a disgraced figure, much like Picasso, because it’ll take modern science a hundred years to catch up with you. Inside your head may well be the answers to getting us out of this.

Her father’s face changed color under the street lamp. You’re being ridiculous. Even if I was what you say I am, you’re telling me the aliens can not only detect our military installations, but the glowing radiance of a single mind? He swallowed hard.

Hailey kept her face neutral; she wasn’t looking to flick that panic switch in his head again. She’d said too much already.

THREE

HARDING COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

Come on, Mom, Hailey said taking her by the hand and lifting her off the porch stoop. We’re going someplace where they have a much better view of the sky.

Really? Because, honestly, I think it’s pretty good from here.

To her mom’s credit, she had snuck that comment in between the thunderous explosions of meteor fragments landing nearby, so, even if she was missing her mind, she wasn’t missing the beat.  Also working in mom’s favor, her red hair and fair skin and freckled complexion, free of all makeup—she had never been the kind to plaster on war paint—warmed noticeably in the glow of flaming meteors whizzing by.

Hailey had her at the car. Her mother pulled at her arm, heading back to the house when the house exploded.

The angle of the asteroid hit alone had saved them, not just hammering the house to ash, but skidding along at a trajectory that took out six other houses in turn.

Her mother got thrown into the back seat from the force of the blast. Her singed eyebrows and charcoaled face looked as if a special effects artist had spent hours on her. 

Her mom sat up, catching her bearings faster than Hailey expected, eying the ruination of her house before her.  Maybe you have a point, dear, her mom said. You really need the well-appointed homes with the candles in the windows and the fireplaces glowing inside to properly offset the meteor shower. I’m sure the view will be appreciably better elsewhere.

Hailey picked herself off the grass growing in the sidewalk, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Strap in, Mom.

Why?

Hailey painted a plastic smile on her face and continued the conversation via the cracked rearview mirror.  I fear a cop driving by and ignoring the end of the world to give you a traffic citation.

Yeah, that’s all we need right now. Her mom strapped herself in. 

Hailey muttered to herself as she turned the ignition, I knew you could act the part of an adult, Hailey. You’ve been around enough of them. I just didn’t know you had an Oscar performance in you.

Her father hadn’t lifted his face from his laptop screen or his fingers from the keyboard the entire time, not since their arrival at the house.

How’s the pep talk coming, Dad?

Oh, this thing will drive through Armageddon like a Sunday drive through the park, he announced confidently.

Hmm, Hailey said, to help us bond with it, it must be modeled to pass itself off as a genuine family relation.

FOUR

ABOARD THE STARSHIP NAUTILUS

Leon, using the Herculean strength granted by his 6’ 4" WWF-grade, entirely-on-steroids wrestling physique, and the wide-angle of view provided by his shaved, perfectly-round dome of a head, grabbed the steering wheel of his convertible cherry red 1965 Mustang and swerved hard to the left—sending DeWitt and his black-striped-down-the-center Day-Glo green GTO sailing past the inside lane into the courtyard they were speeding around.

It was a nasty, vicious, entirely uncalled for move—completely in the spirit of the Demolition Derby they were participating in.

Of course, there was no way Leon would subject his actual Mustang to this kind of punishment, which is why he’d had the Nautilus nano-print an exact replica for him. He had to admit, so far, he could not distinguish the feel of the car or the sweetness of the ride from the original.

DeWitt’s GTO landed high in a tree in the tropical jungle habitat the Nautilus maintained to help the crewmates aboard destress in between battle engagements. The rest of the time, the supersentience that manifested the jungle out of itself was little more than a ball of white light at the center of the ship—and if you tried to jump into it then, there was no telling where you’d end up.

Leon, seeing DeWitt up in the tree, couldn’t help but smile. DeWitt said he always wanted to be marooned on an island with his favorite girl—and that would be his GTO that went by the name of Virginia. Of course, it was the other females of the jungle that DeWitt might well attract with his Fireman’s-calendar physique and his Mt. Rushmore chiseled features that ought to be his real concern right now.

A little help here! DeWitt shouted as he stood up in the GTO, surveying his perch high up in a tree that belonged nowhere but in Narnia, or possibly Jack and the Giant Beanstalk. As one of Leon’s Omega Force operatives he really didn’t do helpless. But that’s how he felt now, and royally pissed off. 

What does a person have to do for a little help around here?! he blurted even louder. I have a kid, and they’re more expensive to maintain than this GTO. I cannot—repeat c.a.n.n.o.t.—afford to lose this race!

Relax, Handsome. I got you. You might want to strap in.

DeWitt, whose reflexes were typically superhuman relative to mortals who had not received special ops training, nonetheless took a beat. The one offering help was a talking female gorilla. A lot of the animals in the forest—all nano-upgraded—talked. He should have been used to that by now. But this thing was the size of Kong. Yeah, okay, DeWitt said, coming in late on cue, collapsing back into the seat and strapping in, afraid of being caught up in an all-too politically correct role-reversal drama of King Kong, with DeWitt playing the dude in distress.

The giant ape got the car in her hand, her thumb up against the driver’s-side door, and her fingers up against the passenger-side door pressing a bit too hard. At the sounds of crinkling metal, DeWitt shrieked, Hey, watch it!  I still have to be able to drive this thing.

You’re lucky you caught me between meals, Gorgeous. This thing looks like a green banana.

DeWitt and his car went sailing through the air to land back on the track—albeit the outside lane, scraping against the metal-glass doors and walls framing the doll houses—the simultaneously affectionate and deprecating term for the Theta Team operative live-work spaces.

Doll houses because Theta Team had been bioengineered from scratch from the Nautilus’s chief supersentience—that oversaw the other supersentiences on the ship.  Theta Team comprised of one-of-a-kind lifeforms that were the Nautilus’s best-guess humanoid adaptations for the variety of worlds in the universe it expected to encounter. She had more than mere speculation to go on—the Nautilus existed in numerous parallel timelines at once—and her supersentience could communicate across them. No doubt, somewhere in some parallel universe, she—by way of her crew—had explored one or another of the alien worlds that inspired these creatures.

DeWitt honked at the Theta Team operative that had the gall to step from out of his doll house onto the track. The Theta Team operative, not surprisingly, ignored him. DeWitt swerved around him and, barely missing him, let out a sigh of relief. He wasn’t the least bit concerned about the Theta Team operative; he was concerned about his car.

He checked his rearview mirror, noticed Crumley had not seen the Theta Team operative sauntering across the track in time to swerve, and smiled. Crumley’s car was disintegrated on impact. Those Theta Team troops were battle-hardened like nobody’s business.

They were pacifists, ironically, one and all, and very hard to piss off enough to get them to lose their temper. The Nautilus had engineered them to suck the intel out of alien worlds by communicating with Gaia, the planetary consciousness, either directly—if it was evolved enough—or indirectly through their numerous scientific aptitudes that made short work of alien ecosystems.

When you were dealing with planets whose plant life was more sentient than its animal life, or your troops were treading on mud that was nano-infused and linked up with a planetary mind far more powerful than even nanite-enhanced Special Forces working together in a coordinated fashion... Well, suffice to say Theta Team had proven themselves several times over during The Star Gate mission—when Omega Force and Alpha Team had first been introduced to them.

True, their pacifist tendencies were quite annoying to fellow military men—the other derogatory term for the dolls was the tree huggers. But when and if they chose to engage the enemy—something not even Leon seemed able to order—look out.

DeWitt smiled, noticing that he was gaining ground on the track. There was no beating American muscle cars, in which bigger really was better; not even Leon’s Mustang was going to fare well against DeWitt’s GTO.

Crumley—affectionately known as Silver Back to the rest of his Omega Force special operatives, for his hairy body whose follicles were now turning silver, and for his beastly, gorilla-like frame—surveyed the damage to his fire-engine red, convertible 1953 Allard J2X, or what was left of it. He’d seen 2000-piece, monochromatic, featureless, pictureless jigsaw puzzle pieces right out of the box that had a better chance of being put together.

He gazed up at the soldier-scientist that he’d collided with, who said, Sorry, pal. You do know this isn’t a race track, right?

Crumley sighed. Yeah, I know.

The Theta Team operative, about a foot taller than Crumley, and who gave Crumley’s big and beastly body a small and diminutive makeover just by standing this close to him, hiked off, refusing to pay attention to the race in progress.  His name was Theseus. He had a strange camera-iris-looking organ in the center of his forehead he used to teleport with, and flexible reddish-purple body armor that was simply how his skin grew. Crumley, having had more than his share of encounters with him during The Star Gate adventure, had come to like and respect the guy, explaining why he wasn’t teeing off on him right now.

Crumley took one look at the sad state of his Allard, the other cars on the track whizzing by, and simply scattering the pieces further, and whistled in the direction of the tropical jungle.

He was down, but he was not out—not by a longshot. 

Crumley’s pit crew came scampering out of the rain forest, bio-enhanced howler monkeys. They were already groping the pieces and looking for ways to fit them back together. Can you spell hopeless? one of the howler monkeys asked.

H.o.p.e.l.e.s.s. replied another.

That was a rhetorical question, you idiot, replied the original monkey.

Despite their defeatist banter, the team was already reassembling the car with the aid of the tools borne on their tool belts. Hey, will someone get one of the big guys? one of them said. There’s no way we’re stretching out these body panels on our own. 

One of the howlers did its thing, screeching up a storm, calling for the attention of one of the gorillas. He did so by stepping out in front of one of the cars and squealing so loud he spooked Ajax, who swerved so hard to get around him that he sent his car rolling on its side to land upright after about a dozen tumbles.

Ajax crawled out of his upside down white convertible 1957 Ford Thunderbird, known as a Battlebird; it had been designed to compete at the Daytona Time Trials, once upon a time. He stared in shocked horror at his car. This is no way to treat a supercharged Ford V8 backed by a jaguar transmission. He pulled at the hair on the back of his head. On the plus side, you still have your head, Ajax. Go figure. He regarded his wavy carrot-colored hair, fair, freckled skin, and deep set green eyes in the car’s upturned side-view mirror, and struck the same pose he did for the Fireman’s calendar back on Earth, when he was Mr. June. "You don’t look so bad with all the battle scars on you."

He strained trying to flip the car back over.  This is what you get for delousing from your nanite infestation. Techa, it sucks to be un-upgraded!

Techa, the goddess of technology, had become the one most worshipped since each breaking generation of applied science brought remarkable new abilities and a rebirth of sorts.

But like the rest of Omega Force, currently in a death race with him, Ajax had chosen to detox of nanites in between missions. It was that or go insane from access to augmented and virtual realities that Omega Force just found entirely too much. Of course, he was the youngest on the team, and he was pushing thirty. The nanites kept them going in a tough business that chewed everyone up and spit them out—even the bioenhanced.

Alpha Unit—comprised largely of late-year teens—on the other hand, lived for the augmented and virtual reality shit. He doubted they ever deloused from the nanites. They were likely off somewhere on the Nautilus now engaged in nextgen games more suitable to youth.

Failing to turn the car over, Ajax did the next best thing. He slid it out more into the center of the track, where it was easier to hit.

Sure enough, not everyone managed to get around it. When Leon hit it, he sent the Battlebird tumbling again.  This time it landed right-side up. Thanks, pal! Ajax shouted at him.

Leon gave him a dirty look in his rearview mirror.

Ajax smiled. Some people just need a high five. In the face. With a chair. Probably just as well he couldn’t hear that, Ajax thought. Likely to go over as well as the rest of his one-liners.

He jumped back in the 1957 Thunderbird and back into the race.

Cronos, in his blue 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda with black roof and rear panels, gunned it over a ramp on the track to land on top of Leon’s convertible mustang, pancaking it just a bit, before the rear tires got enough traction to speed off.

Leon popped his head back up—he was lucky to duck out of the way so fast without his upgrades—to give Cronos a savage look.

Cronos made the sign of the cross over himself, and kissed the old-style crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror.  God helps those who help themselves.

Cronos was Sufi once, and then he was Muslim. But ever since reading a book on the Knights Templar, the whole Christian thing had really taken, and he’d yet to abandon it.

He wasn’t sure how his bronzed skin, bald head, and Cro-Magnon features played with the whole Knights Templar vibe.  He was pretty sure Cro-Magnons worshipped no god at all. The steel plate in Cronos’s forehead, for that matter, violated the whole my body is a temple idea, as did the nanite-surgical repair of his severed penis with another man’s dick.  That latter blasphemy had occurred in Syria after a nasty fight with a nonbeliever, before Cronos joined up with Omega Force for the Sentient Serpents mission. Alas, God’s love melts away all mankind’s transgressions.

The howler monkeys were bringing Crumley parts there was just no fixing. Crumley, Omega Force’s quartermaster and procurement specialist, was not one to be found coming up short on inventory—of any kind.  He made a bird sound at one of the creatures in the forest. 

It was a queen ant—modeled on the creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien—about twelve feet tall and guaranteed to scare the daylights out of the most upgraded humanoid. It scanned the part in its hand with its laser eyes, and then spit the part out of its egg-laying chamber, shooting the component torpedo-like in Crumley’s direction.

Crumley pulled the part out of the placental sack and handed it to the howler monkey with the damaged part in his hand, so he could replace it.

Crumley signaled the queen ant that it could be a bit more on the down-low with a hand gesture. The queen ant immediately camouflaged itself, taking advantage of its chameleon outercoat.

Then Crumley signaled her to scan the rest of the broken car parts that were beyond repair and shoot the replacements to his pit crew. Which it did.

The gorilla, mercifully one of the regular-sized ones, stretched out the bent panels as best he could and passed them along the assembly line.

A few seconds later, thanks to the speed of his pit crew, Crumley was back in action, revving the engine and speeding down the track.

Leon, surveying the track and the state of the vintage vehicles in his rearview mirror, as the demolition derby was heading into its thirteenth lap, said, There’s a special place in hell for people who do things like this to classic sports cars.

I will stand by God’s side and proclaim your everlasting worthiness to be included among the saints, the bartender said, coming up alongside, matching Leon’s speed. Though I’m fairly convinced, as is Nietzsche, that God is dead. He sighed. Thank you for this!

It was the Nautilus’s chief bartender who had proposed the demolition derby as a way of blowing off stress at the end of The Star Gate mission. Technically, this version of the Nautilus had never been through the Star Gate; it had stayed to protect Earth. But enough of them used the rejuvenation tanks, which allowed for limited communications across timelines. And, well, the bartender’s idea was simply contagious enough to jump timelines in a heartbeat.

The bartender had delivered on his end of the deal by making Leon divinely drunk, despite what the best body-maintenance nanites could do to neutralize Leon’s high—all in exchange for the opportunity to participate in a demolition derby. As to why exactly, well, the man was entitled to eschew the third degree interrogation for a simple favor. 

The bartender was one of the creations of the Nautilus’s chief supersentience, who went by Nauti or Mother depending on context and who was referring to her, and one’s choice of derisive sarcasm. His beard consisted of snakes with the heads of humanoid female femme fatales, each one unique. Same for the long hairs on his head that dropped below his shoulder and blended with his beard. Though Leon didn’t have the courage to ask the question, he was fairly confident the venom the fangs on those femme fatales could inject delivered highs far in excess of any liquor the bartender served up.

The bartender, finished thanking Leon, and floored it, zooming past him in a maroon 1953 Ferrari 250 roadster. He’d originally requested a duplicate of Leon’s 1965 Mustang, but Leon reassured him the Nautilus could procure for him the car of his dreams.

Leon put his eyes back on the road in front of him in time to see the White Indian materialize before him, in nothing more than a loin cloth, his figure lean and defined for living no less cushy a life than any of Leon’s Special Forces.

It was the shaman that had befriended him in their Sentient Serpents adventure. He’d reached out to Leon in a like fashion on The Star Gate mission. If the Ley line energies were flowing strongly enough through the mountain in the Amazon where he did his meditations, he could reach out with these body doubles, or avatars, across time and space.

Leon, he said, this is no time for games. And then he dematerialized. While the shaman’s face looked haunted on a good day, today he seemed more demonized than ever.

Leon sobered on a dime.

He braked, coming to a complete stop, the Mustang’s tires screeching in concert with his sense of rising tension, then he clambered out of the dinged-up vehicle.

Stood facing the cars racing toward him.

He figured his face and his stony posture said it all. Standing 6’ 4", with a physique like Dwayne Johnson in his heyday, standing in just his camo-fatigue pants and boots, his tanned upper body exposed and glistening, he figured he’d catch most anyone’s attention even if he was just playing crossing guard.

The rest of the team came to a halt in their speedsters, their engines rumbling, and croaking more than humming at this point. The chassis of those cars were protesting even more loudly.  

Nano up, Leon ordered. We’re mission critical. He was already hiking through the flock of cars.

He was not making a beeline for his rejuvenation tank, but for the bridge. Mother. You need to bring me up to speed now. He’d yet to squeeze the facetiousness out of his tone when uttering the word Mother in deference to the Nautilus’s chief supersentience. But he’d yet to think of anything better to call her.

Leon had a higher clearance and superior access to her than anyone else on Omega Force or Alpha Unit, anyone except perhaps for Theta Team, her true children. The rest of the lifeforms aboard were likely just tolerated by her, like benign infestations.

The atmospheric nano, typically invisible, at Mother’s behest, made its presence known, swarmed him and ate him down to nothing in no time. The nanites then reassembled him along transhuman guidelines from an up-to-the-second backup copy of Leon stored inside the Nautilus’s chief supersentience. 

Excellent, he said, without breaking stride, feeling the difference immediately, taking it all in with a power breath and a flexing of his upper body muscles. 

FIVE

ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

DeWitt surveyed the others in the banged-to-hell demolition derby cars. I guess the fastest way back to our rejuvenation tanks is still via the cars.

No argument from me, Cronos said, revving the Hemi Cuda. You think this car is dented up... It at least is made of metal.

I have enough compacted discs, Crumley bitched, to officially qualify for slug status. Definitely time to reacquaint myself with my transhuman alter ego. He drove off ahead of them.

Speak for yourself! Ajax shouted after him, and shivered from the chill running up his spine. Those rejuvenation tanks... It’s the dreaming that gets me. Haunts me is more like it.

What if dreaming is our brain’s way to show us what our other selves are doing in the multiverse? Cronos replied.

Ajax glared at him with a look that could peel the paint off his car. Get out of my head. He sped off. The others right on his tail.

Shit! It was Cassandra. Headed straight for them.  Sauntering like only she could. With complete feline grace and economy of movement, paired with a deadliness no lioness could match. Stark naked except for the way her nano airbrushed her private parts with the thinnest of undergarments. 

More superweapon than human.

Her body paint was also courtesy of nanotech; it had her looking right now like one of those natives in Avatar, just a bit more phosphorescent, the blues a bit deeper; the yellow eyes big and sparkling. The dated movie reference, he had to remind himself, wasn’t all that dated. It was easy enough, aboard the Nautilus, to think it was 2130 and not 2030. Tesla-grade minds could do that—crinkle the timeline all to hell. Cassandra must have stepped out of the rainforest where she was no doubt practicing her jungle maneuvers.

She was technically the sixth person on Omega Force. Though where she went, no one else could truly follow.  Auspiciously co-lead as well, she could rarely be bothered to oversee the team; Leon would really have to be down for the count for that. As to what she would think of their demolition derby... well, she didn’t exactly go in for R&R.

She parted them like the Red Sea by extending her arms in front of her the way professional divers did before jumping into the water and then prying her arms apart.  In one gesture the jungle had reverted to its light-sphere status.

The Nautilus’s Mars war god had been activated. The supersentience focused on nothing but battle strategies and tactics.

The cars went sailing into the light sphere. No doubt to be dematerialized as so much food stock for the nuclear-fusion-like reaction that was Mars’s thought processes.

As to the rest of Omega Force... Ajax could only speak for himself. He’d ended up back in the rejuvenation tank in his private quarters, splashing into it and sinking below the surface of the breathable liquid.  It took him a few gasping breaths to get used to the sensation. No doubt the others had been helped to their destinations in the same way.

Leon arrived on the bridge to find Solo, nicknamed Nemo, because like Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s Nautilus, he had a better understanding of the spaceship they were on than most anyone. He was humanoid, but only barely. They’d encountered him originally in the Amazon Jungle, during the Sentient Serpents mission. He was the leader of both the Umbrage and the Nomads. Of the two classes in their society, the Umbrage were the reptilian-looking humanoids, the Nomads, the Umbrage’s idea of hired muscle, giant T-Rex-like dinosaurs. But Solo had taken to space with them, advising that they would need his peculiar talents. It was hard to argue with a man whose mind worked in multiple dimensions, and who had already stopped an enemy that no one else could stop from taking control of Earth. Barring the Nautilus’s supersentiences themselves, he remained the biggest mystery aboard ship.

As eye catching as Solo was—looking like a lizard that had learned to stand upright, with a phosphorescent green, scaly exterior, sans tail, and rainbow eyes—he was outclassed by what was on the viewport.

Earth was under asteroid bombardment.

God damn it, Solo! Why wasn’t I summoned to the bridge at once?

And what were you going to do to stop an asteroid bombardment, exactly, Leon? Solo asked, without turning away from the screen, and the all-too mesmerizing sight.

Tell me we’re doing more than passively standing here watching the destruction of our planet!

Solo leaned on his cane with the faceted crystal dome handle, looking much like a magician’s stick—and the powers it possessed did nothing to dispel that analogy.

I’ve been doing what I can to run interference.

And by that you mean...?

The ship moved from its current location directly into the path of one of the meteors. Leon gasped and braced himself, his special forces training alone keeping him from being thrown on his ass. He immediately bent at the knees and leaned into the direction of impact as if about to be tackled, his arm reflexively rising to cover his face.

Except for a shudder quaking the entire ship, the meteor broke apart harmlessly against the Nautilus’s energy shields. Solo must have been throwing the Nautilus against smaller asteroids earlier, for Leon not to have felt the impacts out on the racetrack. 

Solo teleported the ship into position yet again.

Another meteor came straight at them.

The ship shook from the collision harder than before.

This ship can’t teleport, Leon calmly informed him.

Linked to my mind, it can, Solo replied, again keeping his eyes to the viewport.

It was comments like that which had earned Solo wary looks from day one.

This is a losing battle, Leon replied, putting his eyes back on the viewport, even as the ship teleported again to intercept the next meteor.

I know. My job now is only to protect your people on the ground.

My people? Leon realized Solo was referring to the cloned Alpha Unit and Omega Force teams on Earth.  Each had been assigned a mission no less critical to saving the planet.

The Nautilus had no trouble cloning any of its occupants, or more technically speaking, bioprinting another body and downloading the saved digital versions of their psyches to it.

But it was Natty, the Tesla of his times, who had truly come up with the strategy, and who had identified the urgent need for the Special Forces missions even before Leon could. While Natty’s father had designed the Nautilus, it was still anybody’s guess whether the son would outshine the father.

Thanks, Leon mumbled feebly, thinking of the cloned teams on the ground.

"I didn’t do it to protect them. It’s their missions, which we can’t afford to let go tits up. Whatever we’re up against, the Nautilus alone will not be enough to save Earth."

Leon had to grab hold of the arced railing in front of him this time to avoid being thrown on his ass from the latest collision with a meteor. 

What do you mean ‘whatever we’re up against?’ It’s a damned meteor shower.

We’re under attack, Leon. Our enemy is just smart enough and technologically superior enough to hurtle meteors at us to conserve their arsenal, while they hang back out of range of our weapons, and fully cloaked.

Leon gulped. He didn’t like being the slowest person in the room. Then again, this was Solo. The next piece of the puzzle Leon put together on his own.

Shit! Leon exclaimed. This isn’t even our sector of the galaxy. The stars... So, the artifact on the moon has activated, much as Natty predicted it would.

Not at all as he predicted, Solo said curtly, keeping his eyes on the screen and the peculiar game of billiards he was playing. That artifact on the moon, pending an alien invasion, did not beam the Earth and its satellite out of harm’s way, but into it.

It only now occurred to Leon that Solo’s mind was calculating just how to shatter each meteor so that the fragments didn’t do even worse damage to the planet below. That mind of his, my God...

The insights, regrettably, were not queuing up in Leon’s head in any productive order, not yet. Perhaps even for a Special Forces soldier there was a such a thing as shell shock.

He did his best to think his way through it.

Couldn’t that artifact on the moon simply have beamed us into the path of the nearest asteroid field?

No, Solo said with a hint of impatience and a bit too much force, again without turning away from the monitor. There is nothing random about those impacts. Each one of the meteoroids striking the planet is strategic, meant to cripple the globe’s defenses, and as much as possible, bomb us back to the Stone Age.

Leon let it go how Solo could know that without help from the Nautilus. Smarts were in no short supply around here.  But today, of all days, none aboard the Nautilus were smart enough.

"How fast can the Nautilus clone itself?" Leon asked.

"Not fast enough to affect the outcome of the meteor shower. It doesn’t matter. I’ve already summoned her out of neighboring timelines.  There are no less than a dozen versions of the Nautilus running interference currently."

Leon gasped.  No wonder everyone but everyone looked at this guy suspiciously, wondering if he was more of a threat than an asset.  How the hell did an upright talking lizard outdo things not even a supersentience could manage? The Nautilus could communicate across timelines with the other versions of itself, sure, but this...

"Well, the other eleven Nautili will have to manage on their own. We’re taking this version of the Nautilus and we’ll be doing more with her than playing cosmic billiards."

Just what exactly do you have in mind? It was the first time Solo turned toward Leon to face him directly, and the way he asked the question, with an all-too crisp edge to his voice, Leon got the sense that it was asked in his role as Captain Nemo, and he was daring Leon to wrest control of his ship away from him.

Easy, Solo. I want my brain trust to coordinate with me on our best course of action in the war room, he glanced at the monitor, in a less distracting setting. You, me, Patent, Cassandra, Natty, Laney, the rest of Omega Force, and last but not least, the nun. And I’ll want recommendations from our Mars war God as well—in a form I and the rest of us can assimilate, Solo—not just you. As an afterthought, Leon added, Let’s get Theseus in on this as well. The Theta Team operative had proven to be a valuable liaison with the Theta Team humanoids that few could communicate with. Though Leon wasn’t entirely sure Theseus could fit in any of those chairs in the boardroom.

Leon did an about face and exited the chamber.

Solo sighed. That man does realize I’m not the butler around here, right? 

The bands in Solo’s eyes started turning in different directions. Mars, he thought, addressing himself to their Mars war god supersentience, you will take over the calculations for me to ensure none of the asteroids impact the Earth, or their fragments for that matter, once they’ve impacted the Nautilus’s shields. Recruit more Nautili from neighboring timelines as needed—if those ships are not currently in harm’s way themselves.

SIX

ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

The nun, in her habit, as worn by Carmelite nuns of her order, marched toward the nearest launch bay. Her smooth, milky white complexion and her angelic countenance belied her true nature.

She slipped through the sliding doors, one step closer to exiting a domain she technically wasn’t permitted to leave.  She had been created as the ship’s librarian, the one person versed in what each of the Theta Team one-of-a-kind humanoids could do, the habitats to which they were best suited, and the combat situations in which they might excel—if further analysis of the alien environment in question had been superseded by wartime needs.

It was a good day for superseding Theta Team’s standard operating procedure of engaging their scientific aptitudes ahead of their wartime aptitudes.

Without the nun on board, no one would know exactly how best to deploy Theta Team assets. Technically the Nautilus supersentience could act in the nun’s stead, but she responded to human requests—even that of the ship’s leadership team—only as it suited her. So there was no guarantee she’d forward that information if and when it was needed.

That meant the nun was leaving the ship more vulnerable the instant she was off it. But right now, without knowing what they were up against, knowing which action-figure dolls to put into play in Natty’s toy chest—arguably the Nautilus and all its crew were just his play things—would be next to impossible in any case.

If such a determination could be made, only the Nautilus chief supersentience could make it—by analyzing timelines in which they’d come up against this foe—whoever and whatever it was—and lost. It was possible that in an alternate timeline they’d already won one of these engagements. But when confronted with a civilization advanced enough to lob asteroids at them, the nun wasn’t hopeful salvation in the form of answers to their current problems would be arriving from parallel universes anytime soon.

What’s more, whatever was out there, there were just three lifeforms aboard the Nautilus likely to survive an up close and personal encounter with it: Cassandra, Solo, and the nun. They were all more superweapon than humanoid in their own way, but of the three, the nun was the closest approximation to the Nautilus supersentience possible in humanoid form. Hence the nun was the most likely to make the quick assessments needed to get in and out in the shortest span of time. 

The nun surveyed the spacecraft options at her disposal. Jet fighters. Troop transports. And more. Each powered by various propulsion systems: nuclear, matter-antimatter, solar sails, et al. None of the modes of travel would get her where she needed to go in time.

Some of the craft were powered by black hole engines; others could open wormholes about themselves. Better. But they’d detect her coming a mile away. Enough time to destroy her before she became a threat to them.

To hell with this. Nauti just beam me where I need to go, please.

With my scanners blocked, I can’t guarantee where you’ll end up. Nauti’s tone was matter of fact, and not at all motherly despite many of the crew preferring to refer to her as Mother.

I’ll take my chances.

And I won’t be able to beam you back.

You leave that to me.

Mercifully, the nun, who preferred to economize on her words as much as her actions, didn’t get subjected to a long diatribe of warnings and disclaimers on the Nautilus’s part. Evidently they shared at least one quality in common.

The nun found herself beaming off the ship for destinations unknown.

Cassandra tromped into the nearest launch bay on the Nautilus, moments after the nun had left. She could still smell her. Don’t tell me that bitch is trying to steal my thunder.

Nauti, do your thing.

The Nautilus teleported Cassandra behind enemy lines without further ado.

Leon entered the war room. Aside from Theseus, who was standing for obvious reasons—he’d have broken a chair if he tried to sit down—all the seats were filled, except for two.

Two of the queens on this n-dimensional chessboard are missing, Leon protested. Where are they?

Solo groaned. Behind enemy lines.

I don’t remember giving that order—just yet.

Yes, well, I don’t envy you playing MC to this circus of prima donnas, Patent croaked. Patent, Leon’s Alpha Unit team leader, was used to a certain amount of insurrection from his teens; this latest generation of space cadets it seemed did better with the cutting edge technology than with respecting authority. But Patent was surprised and irritated himself by the conspicuous absence of two members of the brain trust. Patent had a similar physique to Leon’s with a bald head to match, but perhaps was a little broader in the back and shoulder due to the ridiculous amount of armaments he liked to carry into battle. His face was a bit more lined with age and weathered from the additional field work he saw.

Leon didn’t need a face-recognition algorithm running on his neuro-net to know Solo was hiding something. I know what kind of antenna your mind is, Solo. Stop holding back, just show us, Leon commanded.

Solo took a power breath and exhaled forcefully.  I gotta tell you right now, it’s no morale booster.

The ship shuddered from the latest impact with an asteroid. From the decline in bone rattling, Leon figured Solo was getting this version of the Nautilus clear of the asteroid bombardment and leaving running interference to the other Nautili, but they weren’t entirely free yet. That, or, speaking of the cabal of prima donnas, he’d disobeyed Leon and ordered the Mars war god to take over for him in his game of cosmic billiards, and the Mars war god was just a touch better at playing the game.

It’s a little late for false hope in any case, I think, Leon said dryly.

Usually a 3D holographic projection was brought up by Natty or Cassandra, using a remote control to access Mother and to convey intelligence gathered for the briefing. This was the first time Solo had offered his mind up as a cosmic radio to the stars, broadcasting audio and video directly from his third eye, the chakra in the center of his forehead.

As always, the broadcast was projected over the long oval boardroom table made of cypress, centered for everyone to see.

The chorus sounding off included all but a few voices who were likely too stunned into silence to speak up: Shiiiiiiiiit!

Cassandra materialized off world, in the depths of space, between a cluster of