Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) (14 page)

“Malel, have the polar frigates try to ram the—”

“Gone, High Captain!” the Orko exclaimed as it
fell back on its rear pair of legs. “One enemy starship vaporized them with two antimatter blasts. And . . . our tachRemotes show the eight ships have re-entered Translation. To where we do not yet know.”

High Captain Yorkel gave credit to the Human Dragoneaux for choosing to exit Translation with the moon lying between his battleglobes and their ships. And those ships, in the brief real time image they’d seen before the Alcubierre screens went up, resembled a space-going version of a T’Chak alien, with the black wings, red eyes and long tail that matched the vidimages from more than two hundred millennia ago. Why the Human had chosen ships that looked like that, when early reports of his ship showed it possessing the standard central tube with outrigger pontoons for its two antimatter cannons, escaped him. He had seen with his own eyes the
current appearance of this Human’s ship. Was his ship, and the other T’Chak Dreadnoughts, able to change body shape? If so, if the ships were made from a flexible hull material, then this opponent could imitate the look of most any starship belonging to an Anarchate species. Clenching his feet claws, Yorkel gave orders.

“Wherever they next appear we will attack! If the gravity wave pulses are on an open vector line, fire along that line! If elsewhere, dispatch some of our thermonuke Offense
sleds. And keep your eyes or perceptor stalks focused on the vidimages from our tachRemotes!”

In front of him the Bridge crew fell to their duties, Malel and Tactical Weapons Chief Lark first among them. As they should be. If they could not out-think and out-fight this renegade Human, their ancestors might soon have company on the Spectral Side.

George’s mindsense took in the space on the daylight side of Megil as his ship
Inevitable
and his seven battlemates blossomed into existence upon exit from Translation. Each of them immediately raised Alcubierre space-time shields in view of the Picket Globe attack from the back side of the local moon. This time only three Picket Globes were in range to explode and pelt his, Suzanne’s and Gondu’s ships with coherent x-rays. No one was harmed. But the tachRemote he had ejected before raising shields reported plenty of comsats in orbit about the planet, along with several tachRemotes so close he could have physically swatted them. If he’d been foolish enough to stay in normal space mode. He recalled Matt’s memory of the attack on starship
Mata Hari
as it left Hagonar Station with Eliana at the start of Matt’s crusade to defeat the Halicene strip-mining of her home planet. The impact of lasers on the ship had felt like the sting of wasps. He had no desire to experience directly such an attack on the physical body of his ship.

“Neither do I,” murmured Inevitable in her feminine voice,
dropping her green mindglow to appear as a blond-haired copy of Suzanne. “Our Translation this close to the planet has caused multiple earthquakes but no tsunamis. The planet is still stable in its orbit. But several comsats are falling from orbit.”

A result he gave thanks for. The billion members of the Teecheen species who had evolved on this planet might be the hosts to the horror of the
Flesh Markets, but he would not blame every Teecheen for a political decision made millennia ago. His work at the Omega Casino had exposed him often to the CEO mentality of alien and human Owners. Workers to them were replaceable subjects who did what they were told, or else. And the bondServant contracts held few protections for workers, other than the right to food, air, safety and shelter. Beyond that, the Anarchate rule was to be useful or be gone. That said, he looked forward to the destruction of any Anarchate installation in addition to the vaporization of the Flesh Markets.

“So do I,” said Suzanne in his mind, her blond curls and winsome smile filling his heart with love.

George sent her a mental embrace that might normally have squeezed her too tight. He often forgot his own strength in the passion of his love for her. For a woman smart in ways he was not, brave in ways he shared, and devoted to life and freedom in the ways Matt had shown them all life deserved, whether human or alien. “We will prevail. And I like Matt’s maneuver to put us behind this planet. Gotta be frustrating to the battleglobe commander to see us appear here, then there, but be unable to fire directly on us.”

“He is frustrated indeed,” said Eliana from the mental circle of their eight minds. “Alien he may be, but his emotions are very similar to ours. Thoughts I cannot read, but decisions and actions come to me clearly. He . . . he is staying in place, trying to force us to come to him.”

Matt’s hard-bitten mind gave a slow mental nod. “As we will. Once we have dispatched every comsat and Remote sent out by the battleglobes. Oh. When we encounter any of the 23 orbiting commercial starships, let me handle them.”

“What do you plan, Matthew?”
called the AI Flowering.

“
To determine if they are a slaver ship with living cargo onboard,” Matt said. “If so, I will use the Stasis Beam to put everyone on board into stasis hibernation. You and Gondu can then dispatch Access Remotes to enter the ship, rescue the living cargo, then depart. I will take the rescued captives onboard
Mata Hari
once the battle is over, and take them with us to Morrigan system, in Kappa Crucis cluster.”

George liked the idea of rescuing people before vaporizing a starship. “What about the ships that have no captives? That are just normal commerce traders?”

“We will leave them to regain awareness in six hours,” Matt said. “Though they will find a notably changed reality once they awaken.”

Knowing Matt’s plans for the
Flesh Markets and for the moon base, George smiled to himself. This was indeed the way of honor, the way his
Tuatha De Danaan
ancestors would have undertaken a battle.

Matt’s mind felt planetary in size as his
ocean-time
awareness expanded to include the mind perceptions of the starship perceptions of Eliana, George, Suzanne, Gondu, Flowering, Ocean and BattleMate as the eight of them spread outward like eight spokes from the hub of their arrival point.

Comsats vaporized as they were perceived. A Teecheen frigate that fled from them was put into stasis by a shot from his Stasis Beam projector. Several Offense
sleds of the Anarchate fired proton laser beams at them only to disappear when hit by return laser fire from the spinal domes of one of his comrades. The planetary vidcasts buzzed with speculation about the strange ships that had materialized so close to the planet. With a thought to Mata Hari he made sure to override the planetary vidnet with an image of himself declaring he was leading a fight against cloneslavery and bondservitude. He appended a warning to the inhabitants of Halath, where the Flesh Markets were located, that they move far away from the markets.

Twelve
seconds, 322 milliseconds
, murmured his onboard cyberclock.

As
the eight of them curved around the maximum width of Megil and came into direct view of the moon Salla, the sensors of every T’Chak ship detected the three battleglobes that hung in station above the moon’s naval base. Picket Globes dotted the vacuum between the planet and the moon. Those that were within twenty thousand kilometers of his ships fired on them. To no effect. The distant battleglobes held fire since their antimatter cannons could not have any effect beyond a hundred thousand kilometers. And the moon lay at 150,000 kilometers from Megil. Matt focused instead on the ships orbiting above the city Halath, site of the Flesh Markets.

“Matthew, nine of the orbiting starships are simple commerce Traders,” said Mata Hari in his mind, her form
wearing the silvery chain mail of her Lady of the Sword persona. “Fourteen other ships appear to be genome slaver ships late for the annual rendezvous. My sensorBots and limpet comlinks are moving to attach to each ship so we may interrogate the ship’s Core computer on whether any life signatures are captives.”

Matt thought the
freighter shape of the likely slaver ships was proof enough they would hold living cargo, or at least remnants of lives destined to provide the genomic codes for cloneslave infants. Still, he and his Hexagon Prime fleet controlled the space about Megil since the battleglobes remained at the moon Salla. So he waited for Mata Hari’s tiny sensorBots to do their job. With a thought command he moved starship
Mata Hari
to an orbital spot directly above the seven blocks of the Flesh Markets in the city of Halath. Already private transport vehicles were streaming away from the city center toward the rural countryside. Good. His broadcast was being heeded.

“Matthew, when do you wish to extinguish the
Flesh Markets?” asked Mata Hari in his mind.

“After we have stasis frozen the fourteen genome slaver starships,” he said. “Are you
r limpet complinks in contact with each ship?”

His mind filled with the purple sleet of random cosmic rays, the red haze of ultraviolent as reflected from the moon
Salla back toward the night side of Megil, and the infrared glows of the twenty-three ships that lay in equatorial orbit like beads on a string. At the center of that string lay his ship while his fleet comrades had spread out into a circle centered on
Mata Hari
, their noses facing toward the moon and the Anarchate Nova-class battleglobes that had stayed in place. His battlemates and their AIs did not forget the battleglobes could easily Translate to within a few thousand kilometers of him and his fleet, if they so chose. If you didn’t care about major earthquakes on a nearby planet, any starship could Translate deep into a star system. Well, he cared for the local Teecheen, but defeating these battleglobes was the first priority.

“They are in contact, Matthew,” said Mata Hari in his mind. To one side the enormous bulk of BattleMind stood up, flapped his broad black wings and fixed two red eyes on him.

“Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux, are you now prepared to fight?”

Projecting the mind image of an African lion roaring out his challenge across the savannah, Matt sent his answer. “Yes! Once the living captives are removed by Flowering and Gondu, we will destroy every slaver starship.”

BattleMind swung his spike-tail to hit the mental floor he stood on. “Minor trash! What of the three battleglobes that attacked us and then ran cowardly to this moon?”

Matt felt bemused by the alien T’Chak
’s sense of what made up a ‘coward’ in that ancient culture. It was someone who did not live up to their genetic heritage. Ah well. “BattleMind, this time I am not sneaky. This time we will use our great power to destroy the Flesh Markets and to vaporize the battleglobes. Good enough!”

“Adequate,” snarled the T’Chak AI that had brought starship
Mata Hari
into the Milky Way galaxy in search of tactical and battle knowledge of the Anarchate.

In his mind Matt focused on the seven stone blocks of the
Flesh Markets which lay three hundred kilometers directly beneath his starship. “Mata Hari, place a single antimatter blast into the middle of the Flesh Markets. That will be sufficient to vaporize everything within a half kilometer. Perhaps the Teecheen will use the crater for a lake. Or whatever they use for recreation.”

A black beam of coherent neutron antimatter shot down through the dense atmosphere of Megil and impacted on the ancient stones and byways of the
Flesh Markets. A flash of blue-white was followed by a gray-streaked cloud of debris and vaporized matter from the radiant heat of the total matter-to-energy conversion of seven city blocks in the heart of Halath. Some local Teecheen would bear their version of a sun burn. But the cloneslave vats and nutrient chambers where cloned alien and human infants were raised for sale to the highest bidder were now gone. And if his fleet could do this here, then surely they would do the same elsewhere in the galaxy. At similar Flesh Markets in the five galactic arms.

Looking outward mentally, Matt smiled at BattleMind’s giant dragon shape. “BattleMind, would you decimate the fourteen slaver ships that no longer have captives on board? I believe their sleeping crew deserve to join their ancestors. Somewhere.”

Three barrages of antimatter hit the slaver ships. The blue-white glare of the blast radiation was not filtered by BattleMind.

Matt shrugged mentally. It made sense. The T’Chak AI
which had long run this starship any way it wished had only lately come to appreciate the physical limits of its human guests. Anyway, he would soon infest this ship with several dozen human and alien captives, in various modes of physical and mental coherence. With a thought-image to Gatekeeper to take charge of welcoming these new guests once they defeated the battleglobes, Matt nodded mentally to Mata Hari.

“On to the moon.”

“Fire!” cried Yorkel in click-speech.

The battleglobe
Defiant
shuddered with the simultaneous emissions from dozens of laser mounts, proton beamers and the ten cannons for antimatter. Nearby his battleglobe neighbors did the same. On the Bridge, shrieks of click-speech erupted from his Brokeet crew members even as the pheromones of anger nearly overwhelmed him. His eyes fixed on the front holosphere, he waited eagerly for the news from his tachRemotes that lay near to the emergence points of the eight opponent starships.