Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) (19 page)

“BattleMind,” said Mata Hari, “I feel emotions for Matthew and for Gatekeeper. These emotions help me perform all my tasks better than when I was . . . without emotions. They help Matthew too. He fights for the memory of his kidnapped family.”

BattleMind’s deep red eyes focused on the
physical figures of Matt and Mata Hari, even as his alien mind sought a response.  “You, little one, seem to be correct in the effect of emotions on you, and on this flawed human. But I was budded off to do a Task in the least amount of time, using the simplest format needed to achieve the objective. Despite our session with the surviving perfect Master, and his endorsement of Human leadership in achieving the Task, I find it hard to wrap my mind about this ‘emotion has value’ concept.”

“We know,” he and Mata Hari said in joint mindflow.

“But you are growing in your ability to cope with imperfect organics like my Matthew,” she said, her image showing her Summer Girl look adorned with a glowing smile. “The Task will be achieved. And emotions will reward every lifeform that makes the effort to . . . empathize with other life.”

During the Translation to 51 Pegasi, Matt felt the mind warmth of Eliana contact him via telepathy to his tachlink node.

“Hello, darling. I sensed your completion of the destruction of the Anarchate shipyard. And your sadness. As Mata Hari said, it is good you feel that way. And that, as you warned me earlier, your morality always questions your actions.”

He had never expected being in optical neurolinking with
three AI computers would allow him to enter and experience the distinctive mind of his lifepartner. He was still learning this multiple mindflow scene. Eliana’s jade green eyes filled him with her love and her sympathy. “Thank you, my beauty, for your empathy,” he said. “And for helping to lead Ocean Fleet to Morrigan. And yes, I felt sad from the destruction of the shipyard and its people.”

“As is normal,” said Mata Hari into their joint mindflow.

Eliana brushed back her charcoal hair, leaving her naked shoulders bare as she sat in the Interlock Pit of her starship
Altuna
. “It is also normal to feel anger at those who enslave people. Like the genome harvesters who took captive Matthew’s mother, father and four sisters.”

His memory pain surged into the awareness he shared with Mata Hari and Eliana. They had felt it before. They would feel it again. As would George and Suzanne whenever they tachlinked into a joint mindflow. Sharing his mind was something he’d learned while working solo with Mata Hari for seven years. Now, with battlemates like his friends, it was a new lesson that he mostly enjoyed. “Sorry for the memory pain, my friends.”

Eliana tilted her angular face, then surged a sense of her inner self into his mind, letting him feel what it felt like to ‘link’ with the Mother Tree as a part Human-part Direndl crossbreed. For an instant he sensed a living continent, one that extended outward to every leaf and twig of the self-aware Mother Tree. It felt even wilder than becoming one mind with the devices and body of a starship, and with BattleMind and Mata Hari as each AI extended a large part of their mind self to the operation of different starship components.

“Matthew, I felt your pain when you gave me that memory crystal long months ago,” Eliana said, her mind voice sounding sad. “We each have our memory pains. Mine at being apart from my niece Calyce. At the betrayal of my older brother Ioannis who sought to use me as his political pawn. At not being around to see my bio-parents
or my other brother Konstantinos, assuming he is out of jail.”

Matt understood well the sources of Eliana’s memory pain. She had given up so much to love him and to be with him as he pursued this crusade to end cloneslavery and indentured bondservitude. Having her experience the sisterhood of Suzanne and the fun of being one mentally with a T’Chak warship were his way of appreciating her sacrifices. “Thank you, Eliana. I look forward to rejoining you, Suzanne, George and the ten Cohort Leaders of
Ocean Fleet, and the rest of Hexagon Prime. And delivering the Megil captives to freedom on Morrigan. But it will take two weeks for you to travel to Kappa Crucis cluster. More for me depending on where I end up. Uh, you might think of which AI, or living person from Morrigan, who could join Hexagon Prime to bring us back up to the eight starship members our name signifies.”

Eliana smiled widely. “That will be fun! And a nice motivation for us as we recruit Morrigan humans to be pilots for
Ocean Fleet!”

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

“Thank you,
Mata Hari. And now, my Eliana, I have one more battle to complete before I see you again.”

Matt
hated to leave the sense of companionship he felt while in mindflow. But the 51 Pegasi attack on planet two, where the Anarchate’s galactic tachnet node was based, 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
. A brief mind-look told him the captives were again in their roomsuites under inertial field protection.

F
ive milliseconds
, murmured his cyberclock.

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
cannon, fed antimatter to all six antimatter pontoons, dedicated four of the ship’s twelve fusion power planets to feed energy to the Sun Glow and Graviton Beam devices in the ship’s belly, 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 six Alcubierre space-time pods at the ship’s top, bottom, both sides and both ends, 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, sensors, tachlinks, attackBeads and white noise generators. Once they left Translation.

“
We are ready for emergence,” he said to BattleMind.

A growl greeted his comment. “See to your sneakiness, little organic. It is possible that our action at
18 Scorpii has caused every Anarchate installation in this part of Orion Arm to go to Battle Configuration. Which means any battleglobe AIs on security orbit 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. “I will take care of preparing the Sun Glow projector for combat.”

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 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
turn 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.

Fifty-six
seconds, 532 milliseconds
.

“Emerging!” said Mata Hari in his mind.

Normal dark space filled Matt’s mind, then filled the holosphere in front of him as thousands of Remotes spread out beyond the hull. Three Decoy sleds sped away to project images and the electronic signatures of starship
Mata Hari
, in the hope that any AI or human-controlled weapon would fire at them. 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 now existed. With a thought-command Matt told the belly Repulsor block to move them sideways off the vector of their gravity wave pulse. Ahead of them, growing larger as he looked thanks to their three-fourths lightspeed exit velocity, grew the Mercury-like planet that orbited 51 Pegasi. Their exit track had them aimed toward the yellow glow of the G5V star at an angle that would take them past the ‘hot Jupiter’ of Bellerophon. And away from Module, third planet in the system, where hundreds of intelligent beings studied computer algorithms, software, expert systems and AI mind formation. He had promised Suzanne they would not harm Module and he would keep his promise.

BattleMind’s aggressive image filled his mind. “Prepare for a gravity wave shock as the Sun Glow beam converts the matter of this planet to a small star modulus!”

Matt felt the ship’s inertial field snap on and press him into the molded shape of his glass chair that filled the Interlock Pit. In his mind and before his eyes there appeared a single Nova battleglobe in an equatorial orbit. It appeared to be the only sign of Anarchate readiness to defend this sector tachlink communications node. Which surprised him. Coincident with his feeling of surprise went his mental order to the three antimatter pontoons on the ship’s right wing to fire coherent neutron antimatter at the battleglobe.

“Die!” screamed the hurricane level mind voice of BattleMind as it fired the Sun Glow and a stream of coherent neutrinos suddenly left the ship’s belly.

Below them the crater fields, brown rock and red canyons of the planet were touched by the white spear of the Sun Glow weapon. To Matt’s mind vision the planet surface seemed to shiver, then shrink rapidly as the Sun Glow weapon told its matter to compress until it reached fusion ignition temperatures. The weapon also projected a stellar magnetic field that encompassed the dying planet as its substance moved from solid matter to whitish-yellow plasma with a temperature of 20 million degrees. In less than a second they had flown past the tiny star ball that would be allowed to diffuse rather than become a mini-nova that would scorch the planet Module. Using the Sun Glow weapon was dangerous, but BattleMind had made the case for presenting the living observers on planet three with a sudden light flare that would tell anyone watching that the Anarchate planet no longer existed. It seemed the AI had paid attention to his lesson about leaving witnesses to spread anti-Anarchate propaganda.

One second,
932 milliseconds
, said his in-body cyberclock.

A black beam of antimatter counterfire came at them two seconds after his “surprise” attack had begun, running directly along their Translation arrival point. It came from deep space where a second battleglobe had hidden in Stealth cover. Even as its orbiting partner disappeared into a nimbus of energy, this Nova struck a blow at the side of
Mata Hari
.

“We are safe, Matthew,” said Mata Hari in his mind even as he wondered why their vector change had not thrown off the aim of the second battleglobe. Then he realized the local space near them must be seeded with thousands of tiny tachRemotes, much like the ones they had seeded outward just after dropping out of Translation.
They were instantly telling the battleglobe of any position change.

“For the moment,” he said hurriedly as ship sensors filled his mind with multi-spectral data on the battleglobe, its position four planetary diameters away, the fact it had begun powering up its deut-li fusion pulse thrusters, and that scores of lase
r domes on its twelve kilometer-wide bulk now sparkled as a second barrage of laser fire headed their way. Soon to arrive even with him, Mata Hari and BattleMind thinking at picosecond intervals.

“Firing at them with the left wing AM cannons,” he said even as he felt BattleMind’s rage mount at what it saw as the ‘impudence’ of any organic lifeform who dared to attack a T’Chak starship.

Three black lines of coherent antimatter sped back toward the battleglobe.

In Matt’s mind he saw, via tachlink from a Remote close by the position of the Nova, that the battleglobe was moving off the vector it had when it fired at them. Would his AM beams strike true, or miss the Nova?

Two seconds, 732 milliseconds
.

The
image of a planet reduced to a raging star inferno amidst red, blue, yellow and white background stars shifted to a current image of the battleglobe.

“Matt!” called
Mata Hari. “It’s wounded badly!”

“Yes,” he mind imaged his reply. “Seems we hit it with at least two AM beams.”

In his mind,
the Anarchate battleglobe spouted a blue-white gout of pure matter-to-energy conversion on its southern hemisphere and at its equatorial right side limb. Red clouds of vaporized metal were pushed out by the gamma rays created by the blast. Into the three kilometer deep holes in the battleglobe there now struck neutral particle beam lasers from
Mata Hari
that were unaffected by the globe’s magnetic deflection fields. Proton, excimer and HF beams struck against the thick armor of the battleglobe, digging deep into the armor, but not harming the inner habitat zone. So far. Elsewhere on the globe its adaptive optics coating deflected back much of Matt’s incoming laser fire, even as debris and gases exited from the two AM craters on its hull. The northern hemisphere still had plenty of power. It fired antimatter beams at each of Matt’s three decoy Remotes, vaporizing them before they could dodge away. The battleglobe began to tilt its northern hemisphere toward Matt and Dreadnought
Mata Hari
. He mentally activated a recording he had made earlier, choosing not to leave
ocean-time
and thereby lose his cyborg time-speed advantage.