Moving Earth Read online

  SPACE COWBOYS 2

  “MOVING EARTH”

  By

  Dean C. Moore

  Featuring Leon DiSanti

  and

  his Special Forces units:

  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 syllabus—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 grinded, 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 on firepower, 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.”