Vigilante Series 2: Nebula Vigilante (25 page)

Eliana had indeed been worried about Mata Hari, when first they’d left Theta Puppis system and she had come to realize just how ‘linked’ the AI and Matt were. They had called themselves a symbiont, but she had not understood fully until she recalled how the arboreal evolved
Derindl humanoids existed in biochemical symbiosis with the Mother Trees of Halcyon, each Derindl bearing the blood marker that told any Mother Tree that ‘here’ was a mobile part of the Mother Tree. The Derindl species had evolved that way on a world where Mother Trees dominated every landscape. The trees fed the Derindl and the long-tailed humanoids removed parasites and xerophyte floater plants from the branches of each tree. Now, here on this starship, a similar symbiosis had evolved between Matthew and Mata Hari. She led Suzanne over to a rock slab that served as a seat on which they could gaze at the blue lake.

“At first, I was
worried about her. Then later, when I realized Mata Hari was
always
with Matt, always able to help him survive any combat, any encounter with the unexpected, I felt reassured.” She pointed out the yellow flowers of the water lilies that had begun to bloom. “Then, as Mata Hari’s emotionality increased and she became more like us . . . organic people, I felt sympathy for her. I worried she might be the only emotional AI in the galaxy. But now, seeing her with Gatekeeper, I am reassured. And happy she has a companion of her own nature.”

Suzanne pushed back her curls so the sharp planes of her
freckled face presented a study in thoughtfulness. “I agree on the emotionality element of Mata Hari. Never saw the like before in fifteen years on Omega, or at the regional IT training school. Our Gatekeeper had always been friendly and likeable to all organics, even the weird methane breathers. But now . . . he is so much more solid as a person.”

“Agreed,”
Eliana said, leaning against the left shoulder of her friend. “Have you made progress on the embroidered Celtic shirt you are making for George’s birthday?”

“Yes!” said Suzanne happily. “Got enough colored thread while we were on Morrigan to last me for years, and the families of the rescued captives insisted on gifting us with yards and yards of fine cotton cloth, wool bundles, tanned leather, boot and belt buckle metalware, and some incredibly beautiful beer tankards carved from a native tree.”

Eliana had seen those tankards at the Eire Park party, but had not known the full extent of the generosity of the
Tuatha De Danann
people until now. “Wonderful! Though we have perfect climate control on this ship, it is great to see the guys’ eyes light up when they see our newest outfit. Your George and my Matt sure were happy to see us when they returned from the station!”

Suzanne nodded, then turned her thoughtful gaze to fix on Eliana. “That they were. Eliana . . . will we spend our lives on this ship, always being outlaws from the Anarchate?”

She bit her lip. Her new girlfriend clearly shared her own worry. “I hope not. Eventually, sometime in the future, Matt and I hope to have children. Little ones. Like the sisters you had when you were young, Suzanne.”

The blond raised her pale yellow eyebrows. “So you’ve read my Omega personnel file! Do you think my choice of being an information technologist for the Anarchate was the right way to escape
from Thuringia?”

Eliana bit her lip, wondering if she had been right to not tell Matt that George’s lifepartner had been born on the same planet where his family had been snatched by genome harvesters. Well, soon enough he would know. “Yes.
Thuringia, from all that Matt has shared with me, is an agricultural planet with just the Port city as the only high tech outpost. Were you there when the harvesters took his family and ten other people?”

Suzanne reached out and squeezed Eliana’s right hand. “
No. I was already working at Omega, doing software sleuthing for them. But my parents showed me the vidcasts when I came back to visit and wanted to go wandering about the countryside. Everyone kept pictures of the kidnapped families in their home, in a place of honor. His older sister Charlotte, with the brown hair, was the spitting image of the young girl he and George rescued on the harvester ship. I’m glad he could do that. Rescue them, I mean. Have you—”

“Told him about your heritage? Nope.” Eliana knew she should have shared the info after Sarah
Vasiliades gave her access to the personnel roster of the Omega humans. “Figured my Matt had enough on his mind what with battling the Anarchate, coming up with combat lessons to satisfy BattleMind, and doing his best to keep us in home galaxy for awhile. At least we did some good with you Omega folks and the Morrigan captives.”

“Agreed,” Suzanne said, squeezing her hand. “Mind if I tell him during the picnic we have planned here for tomorrow? I think it may be a comfort to him to hear how his family is remembered by everyone on
Thuringia.”

“Yes! Do tell him. And I agree. Now that he has rescued some people from a harvester ship, I think he can handle that memory pain better,” she said to the smart IT woman who’d worked her way
through the civil service training offered by Anarchate officials.

“Shall we go swimming in the lake?” Suzanne asked, standing up and pointing to a few frogs croaking among the lily pads.

“Yes,” Eliana said. She dropped her dress and underclothes, then ran naked to the lake’s edge and dove in. Behind her she heard Suzanne let out a happy shriek as she followed Eliana into the cool blue waters of a mountain lake. Yes, it was a small lifeweb assemblage, but as she surfaced, spitting out water and turning to face the swimming form of Suzanne, she shook water out of her long tresses and said, “Bet you can’t hold your breath as long as I can! We crossbreeds have a genetic advantage!”

Matt
sat in the Interlock Pit, a day after the surprise news from Suzanne that she hailed from his home planet of Thuringia. It had touched him greatly to hear how his home world still honored his parents and the other captives. He’d not returned home after leaving as a personal servant to an alien ship captain at the Port, so he’d missed out on the way the planet’s people had begun a ground level campaign to distribute holo cubes of the captives to every household on that wintry world. It had cost many platinum Standards to make the cubes, but the funding drive had met that goal and even exceeded it. The excess had been used to create a small memorial pillar in the plaza center of the town that had grown up with the space port. He had reassured Eliana she had done right to hold back the home news until they were far away from Orion Arm. Elsewise he might have chosen to return home. And going home to Thuringia for him or to Halcyon for Eliana was the one predictable action that he was sure the Anarchate was waiting for them to do.

The ship’s inertial field pressed against him as Mata Hari politely reminded him they were just minutes from Translation emergence. He smiled, then reached back, grabbed the fiber optic cable, and plugged himself into his ship and his friend’s so very feminine mind. “Hi there!”

“Hi there yourself,” she said.

Mata Hari blossomed in Matt’s mind as the avenging Barbarian Queen, her right hand holding a steel
saber, her body dressed in chain-mail and bronze-plated skirt, while her black eyes showed a ferocious determination that matched his own. Distantly he felt a mental echo from Gatekeeper, who’d tended to the Meligun bear during the days they’d spent in Translation, and who now moved to be a mental ‘backup’ to Mata Hari, keeping his attention on the ship’s ecofields so Mata Hari could backup Matt and BattleMind as they wielded weapons beyond thinking. But now they had to be used. To his right blossomed the giant form of BattleMind.

“I see you are as prepared as an organic can be,” boomed the alien’s voice in Matt’s mind.
“I will use the Sun Glow weapon against Megadeen moon while you use our other weapons against the Nova battleglobes and other Anarchate targets in space.”

That was the order of battle they had all agreed to, earlier today. They would arrive next to Megadeen, destroy it and the battleglobes, then Translate immediately on a south galactic heading for the start of the Magellanic Stream and their journey outward to the Small Magellanic Cloud.
That would begin Stage Two of BattleMind’s plan.

“Agreed,” Matt said to the hungry-feeling mentality of BattleMind. “You seem eager for this battle.”

“Of course,” the alien said spreading his scaly black wings widely across half the Bridge. “Once we are done here I will finally be on my way home to Cluster Prime of the T’Chak Imperium. There should be plenty of other Destruction Devices in the cluster with whom I can mind-link and learn about the strange quietness of my masters.”

“One minute to emergence, Matthew,” said Mata Hari in his mind and aloud for the benefit of his companions.

“Thank you, dear lady.”

He hated to leave the sense of companionship he felt in slow human mode, as he sensed the movements and reactions of his companions. But this was to be a lightspeed battle carried out at computer mind speeds. He PET thought-imaged
himself into the mind flows of Gatekeeper, Mata Hari and BattleMind.

Ocean-time
filled his mind and inner self. Femtoseconds rushed by as picoseconds moved tick-tock past his awareness, and nanoseconds felt like long minutes. Oceans of data filled every part of his body and mind.

His skin became the ship’s outer hull and his internal self became the fusion power plants, grav plates, ecofields and weapons normal and incredible that filled the Restricted Rooms of starship
Mata Hari
.

Matt leaned into the raging mind flow of BattleMind, observing as the T’Chak AI activated the ship’s fusion pulse drive, powered up the axial plasma generator, fed antimatter to all six antimatter pontoons, dedicated four of the ship’s twelve fusion power planets to feed energy to the various laser mounts on the ship’s hull, adjusted the sapphire crystal skin to match the recorded laser frequencies from their prior battles with Anarchate
battleglobes, added more carbon-carbon ablative skin underneath the sapphire layer, extruded the five Alcubierre space-time pods at the ship’s top, bottom, both sides and forward hull placements, activated the field for production of the Sun Glow beam, and emitted thousands of Remotes to spread out beyond the hull and serve as holo decoys and white noise generators. Around Matt’s starship skin rose the flat Alcubierre space-time fields that would deflect any object or beam into a different universe than the one where they existed.

“Prepared for emergence,” he said to BattleMind.

A growl greeted his comment. “See to your sneakiness mode, little organic. It is possible that our action at Galifray has caused every Anarchate installation in this star cluster to go to Battle Configuration. Which means the battleglobe AIs will—”

“Be on AutoDefense mode,” Matt interrupted the
T’Chak dragon, even as the gale of its thoughts buffeted his mind. “The Alcubierre space-time sheets will open only long enough for our battle beams to pass through. Each opening will close within five femtoseconds. The fastest response recorded for any Anarchate AI on AutoDefense mode is twelve femtoseconds.”

“See to the antimatter beams that you control. You will need them to destroy the battleglobes,” BattleMind said impatiently.

Its awareness receded from Matt as the AI focused on Alcubierre field strengths, laser gas stability, and the power up of the Sun Glow weapon. Its Restricted Room shimmered with neutrinos and felt slightly out-of-time. Even as Matt watched, the T’Chak AI caused the weapon to extrude from the ship’s belly. A ring of tubes now projected downward, able to turn a planet into a miniature sun of plasma. He’d been told by Mata Hari that the fluctuating nature of the three types of neutrinos had been harnessed by the T’Chak into a weapon whose neutrino emissions would transmute any solid object into stellar plasma particles. The weapon’s effect would keep the plasma magnetically confined long enough for their ship to move away from a future mini-nova.

His arms felt the spread of the T’Chak dragon wings as the ship assumed the shape of an avenging dragon, its crocodile snout showing white teeth, its mouth able to emit a coherent purple plasma
globe, its tail the antimatter-cooked exhaust of the fusion pulse drive, while its purple armor-plated skin sprouted dozens of laser domes ready to emit megawatt beams at the nearest targets that would appear upon Translation emergence.

Two milliseconds to emergence, Matthew
, said Mata Hari in his mind.

He braced his inner self, his physical form long ago restrained by the ship’s inertial fields. Matt split his mental attention into several parts. One part moved the coherent neutron antimatter pontoons into various directions, some pointing sideways and two pointing straight ahead, counting on the fact that targets of some kind would be downrange of where he pointed the pontoons. Another part of him directed the spinal laser domes into pointing to either side of the ship, since he knew they would be running some kind of gauntlet of nearby ships, a gauntlet that would eventually pass by their sides. A third part of his mind told the axial plasma generator to rev to its highest magnetic level so it could railgun shoot the instant they emerged. He liked the idea of a two hundred meter wide plasma cloud preceding them to soak up any spybots, sensor bots, Offense sleds, field sensors and similar devices that would likely have been seeded in the near-space of the moon Megadeen. While the ship’s nose field of Alcubierre space-time would soak up such small items, he preferred to eliminate them before they reached the ship’s outer defense shield. The loss of one Alcubierre projector to a multi-megaton assault had not left his memory.