Vigilante Series 2: Nebula Vigilante (12 page)

Sarah and her friends watched the human man who seemed more comfortable with AIs walk out to the Spine hallway
with Eliana and disappear from their sight. Now, if only her memories of the vaporization of the casino could disappear as easily. While she had never liked any of the Owners, even the two human ones, she still felt traumatic shock at seeing the place she had worked for twenty-five years be vaporized by a black antimatter beam. It left a memory of danger that none of her fellow humans would easily forget.

Matt sat in the Interlock Pit
five minutes before the end of Translation, soaking in the lightbeam data inputs. He rested within a metal-lined cone, a cone filled with flashing lightbeams that did not hurt. The cone breathed with him, hurt with him, talked to him, and listened as he talked back—with a shrug, with a blink, and lightspeed quick with a change in PET-imaged codes. At the normal human speed level a twitch of fingers, groin, or feet would do. Matt controlled his levels of adrenaline, signaling with his body, a puppet on lightbeam strings who talked back to the puppetmaster. Those being the T’Chak starship and his AI friend, Mata Hari.

Her verbal repartee was all very nice, but
Mata Hari was not a clone-brain floating in nutrient solution—like those that ran the starships of some spacefaring cultures. Nor was she the engram of a real or artificial personality, impressed millennia ago upon crystalline memory matrices—like the Memory Pillars on the Bridge. His AI ‘lived’ in the pillars, but her presence filled the ship. And, he’d learned months ago, she was something else. She was the outer “interface” for BattleMind, that T’Chak entity created by the Lacunae Mindworks. It was as harsh as the appearance of an organic T’Chak, but able to listen to options. If Matt could stand the massive data overload that touching BattleMind’s harshly alien mind always brought. Fortunately, Mata Hari buffered that mind-to-mind contact, as she had done during the fight with the two Nova battleglobes. Now, he would have to reconnect to BattleMind as they prepared to mount an offense that moved at nearly the speed of light.

Matt looked left at Eliana, the woman who had given up her world for him.
She was fashionably dressed in an embroidered white blouse, blue jumpsuit and partially cocooned by the clamshells of the accel-couch. She seemed preoccupied with staring at a sidewall display of CC41324, its four gas giant planets and the Ceres-size rock ball that hosted the shipyard’s living quarters, administration, landing field, Tachyon Pylon and even some defense lasers. He already had a mind-image of every Anarchate building on the rock ball, along with a month-old three dee image of the twenty hulls in various stages of construction, most of them in low orbit so transit time from habitats to work took minutes versus hours.

A month ago there were also four Nova battleglobes in higher
geosync orbit that always kept them over the land base, their crews involved in upgrading of weapons systems, cross-training with rock-bound employees of Combat Command, or enjoying the separate Pleasure Dome that hosted living greenery, a blue lake, gambling halls and sexual diversions of every category. No doubt the crews of visiting globeships needed their “entertainment” after weeks and months spent patrolling the nearby space of Orion Arm and Carina-Sagittarius Arm. How many there would be now was something they would discover just after exiting their Alcubierre Drive Translation field and were able to receive five minute old images from the rock ball’s vicinity. At least the white light of the A-type star brought enough illumination to the asteroid belt for his ship sensors to pick up normal light, ultraviolet and infrared images from the rock ball.

The back of his neck twinged.
Mata Hari was reminding him it was time to prepare for leaving Translation.

“Mata Hari,” he said aloud for Eliana’s benefit. “Did you take care of having our guests secured from inertial shock?”

“I did not,” she said.

Matt frowned. “Why not?”

“Because Gatekeeper was tasked by you, as you may recall, with the care, feeding and handling of the refugee humans. I alerted him to the impending exit from Translation. He spread the word of the impending battle and all humans are now secured. Gatekeeper was very careful in his duties.”

Mata Hari’s voice tone carried something extra. Something he had wondered about when Gatekeeper had come aboard while they were orbiting above Omega. “Good. Uh, has Gatekeeper helped you in other ways?”

In his mind Mata Hari’s mind-flow stiffened, suggesting a formality not usually there. “He has been helpful,” she said in a routine voice.

Eliana smiled but kept her attention focused on the sidewall screen that would update with a real-time image of the rock ball’s starships and
hulls under construction once they left Translation. Perhaps his lifepartner knew something about Mata Hari and Gatekeeper that only a female understood. Ah well. To battle it was.

With a sigh, Matt reached back, grabbed the optical fiber cable, and plugged it into the receptor implanted in the back of his neck. At cervical vertebrae one level.

Mata Hari could have plugged him in using a servo. But for Matt to take the cable and plug in, using his own muscle power . . . well, symbolism wasn’t limited to organic lifeforms.

He
focused, accepting electronic and lightspeed photonic input.

The dam burst as once more he entered
ocean-time
. Oceans filled him, oceans of machine-fed data filled his mind’s eye. He saw that BattleMind had already opened the Restricted Rooms to his observation, while Mata Hari herself rubbed her mental shoulders against him, acting as the buffering interface he needed to survive being so close to the hurricane thoughts of BattleMind. Matt PET imaged a series of thoughts that Eliana would hear as a buzz of noise while he would mentally image them as words.

“Mata Hari,
are the ecofields in the roomsuites backed up with secondary power?”

“Yes, Matthew,” said the mind image of the World War I spy who sported the late Victorian white dress as her persona’s standard appear
ance. She now took shape as a life-size holosphere between him and Eliana, who looked startled then nodded as she too heard the slow, human-normal alert of impending Translation departure. “Gatekeeper took care of that matter. As we discussed earlier.”

Four hundred milliseconds, ninety-eight nanoseconds, forty-two picoseconds and six femtoseconds
, murmured Matt’s onboard timebot.

In his mind
there loomed the image of BattleMind the T’Chak dragon, while the mental presence of the starship’s true owner made his mind feel crowded. “Organic Matthew Dragoneaux, do you have any new variations on the Attack Plan we three agreed on earlier?”

The impact of the alien AI’s mind flow was like a cross between a hurricane and a waterfall. Feeling both drenched in its thoughts and battered by their speed, Matt nodded mentally. “One minor change. Rather than turn the rock ball into a small sun using your Sun Glow weapon, I ask that we leave the
living quarters of the Anarchate shipyard untouched by weapons fire.”

“Why!” demanded BattleMind impatiently.

Six hundred milliseconds.

Matt felt nausea twist his stomach and his finger joints ached with the residue of rheumatoid arthritis. Eliana’s and Mata Hari’s mo
noclonal antibodies and epigenetic shutdown proteins had not completely erased the effects of the slow virus.

“To save at least 30,000 of the 42,212 lifeforms that were present on and near the rock ball a month ago,” Matt said, his mind imaging human and alien people living in personal apart
ments that circled the central Admin dome habitat. “As you saw at Omega, I prefer to destroy only the Anarchate’s offensive starships and fighting personnel.”

He felt BattleMind flap its mental wings, the claws at the forward edge of each wing arcing in imagined ripping of the Anarchate foe. “Saving organic lives is secondary to my Task. What purpose is
served by not destroying the entire asteroid and thereby depriving the Anarchate of trained workers?”

“Propaganda,” Matt said quickly, offering a mental image of the galactic tachnet and how rumor, official messages, family messages and vidshows all crossed at FTL speed using the tachyonic
network that linked the entire galaxy in a near “real time” communications net. While the tachnet brought word of his attacks to nearby Anarchate globeships, and thus allowed them to arrive while he was still in a system, it also served the trillions of civilian lifeforms who inhabited thousands of planets across the galaxy. “In short, some of the people we leave alive will understand we
could
have killed them, we did not, and no matter what the Anarchate officials say about our attack, the fact that this ship did so much damage and yet spared lives will spread across the Milky Way galaxy. It will undermine the assumed authority of the Anarchate. Understood?”

“Understood,” grumbled the dragon mind image of BattleMind, its red eyes conveying a look of irritation. “Accepted. Are you prepared for your part in this near-lightspeed assault?”

“He is,” Mata Hari said to BattleMind across their shared mindLink. “And so am I. All twelve fusion power plants are at peak energy output, the directed energy domes are already extruded, and . . . each of your six antimatter pontoons contain magfield reservoirs of neutron antimatter ready for emission upon arrival.”

“Your work was observed by one of my sublinkages and is satisfactory,” said BattleMind, its crocodile mouth opening slightly to reveal very sharp teeth. Though impossible to do for its morphoform, Matt perceived a sense of a ferocious grin. “Now, we begin,” it said, materializing on the Bridge to Matt’s right in its full twelve foot tall shape.

At his left, Eliana began to look startled. Then focused forward. Mata Hari’s holo stared ahead at the front holosphere, which would show all outside combat events at human-normal speed for George and those humans tuned into Channel Seven. In Matt’s mind the lightspeed impulses of various sensors brought the sudden appearance of stars.

They had arrived.

A dragon spread its wings.

One second
, imaged Mata Hari.

In
his mind, the dragon’s upper body armor was studded with directed energy emitters, while its yellow underbelly glowed with Repulsor energy blocks, laser emitters, tractor and pressor beam installations. Most importantly, the Alcubierre space-time pods located at the starship’s nose, top, bottom and both sides glowed with dark energy. And on both wings there pivoted the six AM pontoon projectors, each one now aimed forward and just picoseconds away from emitting their coherent antimatter beams.

Translation shock battered Matt’s mind, nerves and body as if three tsunamis were battering him. He stayed aware, intent and took in the ev
ents taking place at nanosecond intervals.

One second, t
hirteen nanoseconds
.

Suddenly his mind received the current visual image of the shipyard rock ball and those objects orbiting it. They were images just five light minutes old. Very fresh, compared to month-old
imagery from the Intelligence dome memory crystal.

Eighteen partially built globeship hulks orbited just a hundred miles above the surface of the rock ball, while three thousand miles out hung five operational Nova-class battleglobes, their twelve-kilometer wide shapes glowing with a pale
white glow from the distant star. None of them were moving, but the lightspeed image showed each battleglobe stood at operational readiness, prepared to enter combat in a few seconds. Which, Matt knew from the intelligence crystal, was the required status mode demanded by Combat Command for all its combat vessels. Glinting nearby were three triangular courier vessels, and six large Tube Ships that ID’d as optoelectronic supply vessels, carrying starship devices that could not be made locally. Finally, lying fifty thousand kilometers out were thousands of x-ray laser Remotes, each a hydrogen bomb ready to explode and emit coherent x-rays at whatever source was identified as its target. A minefield!

One second, twenty-four
nanoseconds.

“Matthew,”
spoke Mata Hari, “we had not anticipated the minefield. Could it be a new response to our attacks of Combat Command facilities?”

“Probably,” he mind-muttered to his partner, enjoying the sense of mental oneness they now shared. “BattleMind, suggest you add a plasma globe barrage to follow our AM beams as a way of clearing the mines from our entry pathway.”

“Accepted,” said the mental hurricane that battered at Matt’s senses, leaving him shaken in mind. His body would catch up. After all the combat was finished.

One second, fifty
-one nanoseconds.

Mentally he blinked
as the first six antimatter beams speared out toward the five Anarchate Novas. Matt gave thanks there was no need to compute an orbital track progression for the Novas. Their exit from Translation had put them on a three-quarters lightspeed approach to the rock ball, with the ball’s Admin habitats, living units and Pleasure Dome located in the center of the holosphere even now beginning to take shape at the front of the Bridge. While the hulks orbited slowly, and would require computation of where they would be in five minutes, the five battleglobes were located further out and they remained stationary at geosync. That allowed starship
Mata Hari
and BattleMind to aim six beams directly at the five ships.