Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) (2 page)

“Stop!”

Matt PET thought a command to Suit and came to a halt just meters from a wall of the hexag room. Without asking, Suit’s Tactical CPU showed him a location image for the signal’s source. The microwave emission had come from somewhere below the hexagonal room

“We are stopped,” Matt signaled back, using the same FM frequency used by the alien speaker. “Are you the Mind Mother of all T’Chak artificial intelligences?”

“I . . . I . . . I . . . creator source am,” squealed the voice, sounding hollow and angry at the same time. The translated carrier signal lost frequency lock, then returned to the level that had transmitted its first word. “Depart aliens! Leave! Depart! Leave! None but . . . but . . . but T’Chak lords may be here! Leave!”

Still floating in the spiral hallway, Matt noted that George had twisted his suit’s orientation to face rearward, covering Matt’s back even though his own Suit had a globular 360 perception field. Which is how Matt became aware that a large Mech was rolling toward them on clanking tracks. His Spy Eye’s sensors said the Mech carried a field artillery-type laser. A device able to be used both for offense and for heavy construction. Well, it was to be expected.
With a thought Suit shot off several titanium penetrator darts in the direction of the Mech, followed by nanoware energy seekers, metal borers, several Fire-and-Forget nanoshells, then some chemical Sniffers that gyrocoptered toward his oncoming opponent.

“Creator AI, hear once more the
Activation Code given to me by your T’Chak master TrueLife,” Matt broadcast back. “And see its living image as I and others like me visited its underground refuge on HomeWorld. Allow us entrance to your nursery!”

A whine dopplered away from Matt as Suit emitted the Code into the air of t
he hallway even as it microwave-pulsed the signal to the basement source of Mama AI’s emission.

“Noooooo!” moaned the AI’s hollow voice. “Nooooooo! None but T’Chak may exist here. None but T’Chak. None—
”

Matt’s backpack k
a-chunked as a rocket with a napalm warhead shot out, curved into a flat trajectory and flew around the curve that separated him and George from the oncoming Mech.

“
Kaboom!
”

One of his Spy Eyes vanished in the yellow bloom of flame, but another one showed the Mech’s laser
tube partly melted from the rocket’s impact. Several tractor wheels squealed loudly as the device tried to roll forward. In his helmet image the Mech machine swerved sideways, then crashed into the stone wall of the hallway. With a groan Matt could hear through Suit’s external Ears, it slowly backed up, twisted its blocky body, then slowly advanced toward the position of George and Matt. Perhaps intending to run them down. Or simply blow up when it tried to feed power to the damaged laser tube. Penetrator darts slammed into it even as limpet shells shot white noise into its interior, working to disorient it. A few nanoware energy seekers were already boring past its armor, seeking its internal CPU.

“George, we enter here,” Matt said, thought-imaging a command to his and George’s shoulder laser cannons
as they floated in the access-way.

The stone wall of the hexag room flared greenly as four hundred
megawatts of laser light impacted on what Suit said was local granite rock. Spaces between the granite blocks expanded, shattered, then began to show gouges as his and George’s lasers vaporized the dense rock.

“Noooo,” screamed Mama AI on the contact frequency. “My offspring cannot know any organic, any . . . any but the T’Chak. Any but . . . perfect masters. Ohhhhhhh,” it moaned into
gradual silence as the Mech artillery unit ground to a standstill twenty meters and two curves away.

The black granite stone wall showed a dark hole just big enough for Matt
and George’s three meter tall suits. In synchrony the two of them floated forward, their helmet lights spearing through the hole to illuminate a large room furnished with clusters of hexag modules, a few roost pillars, overhead light panels that came on as the ceiling sensed their presence, and a central hole that opened onto a deep basement. His biceps rocket launchers ka-chunked again as Suit shot off Fire-and-Forget sensor shells, followed by the light swish of miniature gyrocopter blades as a few Spy Eyes followed the shells down into the hole.

“Matt, bet Mama AI is below us, down that hole,” George said as he float-turned in his own suit to cover their entry hole with one shoulder laser while the other pointed toward the room’s center. Like Matt, he held a Magnum laser rifle in one arm while the other hand pointed fingertip lasers at the silent machines that surrounded them.

Matt inspected the green colored room that possessed rock walls, a rock ceiling and a titanium-nickel metal floor. There were sixteen hexag modules scattered across the floor, each one pink in color and with a dome set atop the hexag body that sat on the metal floor. Sixteen intrigued him. Did it represent the number of digits possessed by a T’Chak dragon? With four finger-claws on each muscular forearm or heavy leg, he suspected the aliens had followed an octuple math system when they first looked at the stars and thought to count beyond the numbers represented by the male, female and neuter genders of a normal T’Chak family unit. He activated Suit’s infrared sensors and told Suit’s Tactical CPU to inspect each hexag unit, while maintaining a full Combat Mode alert.

“She probably is located below us, George. But it appears these . . . incubators for baby AIs are empty. Perhaps they’ve been empty for millennia.”

“Nooo little minds,” moaned the hollow but sad-sounding voice of Mama AI. “No more. No new ships to guide. No new masters. None. All gone. Gone . . . gone . . .— ”

“Are you lonely, Mama AI?” Matt broadcast to her as he flew Suit toward the central hole that lacked any stair
way. Which made sense for winged aliens who flew from one place to another. The long dead T’Chak researchers would simply drop down into the hole and flutter their wings to land, or flap them to rise back up to this level.

“Alone?” came a sad sound that Suit translated from the ancient T’Chak speech, as it had been doing since they were first contacted. “Who lives? Who lives? Who but me? Me. Me. Meeee—
”

“No!” Matt signaled back as George joined him at the rim of the dark well that gave access to a basement level. “
We Humans live. The Direndl live. The Haktoon live. See this vidlink of your last T’Chak master, one TrueLife, who has chosen to mentor these neighboring aliens?”

As Suit broadcast the record of his, George, Eliana and Suzanne’s interaction with the last known living T’Chak alien, he floated over the rim of the dark well and then lowered
down to the stone floor that lay ten meters below the nursery. They passed by granite near the nursery, then hard lava lower down, telling Matt that this ancient world had once been lively and volcanic. He stopped just above the basement floor.

“Master?” mused the EMF link with Mama AI. “A master lives? Impossible. Not true. Not real. Not—
”

“Yes!” yelled Matt as his helmet light illuminated a three meter wide metal globe that rested atop a
black granite cube, much as Great Remnant had guarded the Suspense-held form of TrueLife. This one, though, was not golden in color. Instead it showed as purple metal adorned with the iconographic script of the T’Chak species, its globular shape the result of hundreds of triangular plates that formed the giant globe. It resembled the thought modulus shape of BattleMind, when the T’Chak AI who had appeared during the battle for Eliana’s planet chose to join them on HomeWorld. The place where they had found the last living T’Chak. “TrueLife lives! He seeks more survivors from the great die-off of millennia ago. He has chosen to mentor the Haktoon species. And he supports our effort to fulfill the last Task given by the T’Chak to your offspring. The Task of surveying the large galaxy nearby with the aim of supplanting the Anarchate rulers who control that disk of stars, gas and lifeforms!”

The giant purple globe resting atop the black stone cube flared a series of surface status lights, then emitted sensor beams that swept over him and George. “You are not T’Chak,” it moaned hollowly. “Not T’Chak . . . Not T’Chak . . . Not—”

“Yes we are!” Matt yelled through his external speakers.

George gasped. The purple metal globe stopped its disconnected talk. An infrared sensor beam focused on Matt. “You . . . you have no wings. You are too small. You cannot be infant T’Chak as your head is malformed,” Mama AI said with a tone of alertness.

“But we
think
like your masters the T’Chak!” Matt broadcast, then told Suit to land on its boots and open the back of the unit so he could exit, naked and unarmed.

“Prove it,” Mama AI said in her own acoustic voice, its meaning instantly translated by Suit. Its voi
ce tone sounded almost rational. Clearly his assertion of being the same as a T’Chak had awakened something coherent in the alien AI.

“Matthew!” cried Mata Hari from his orbiting starship. “You risk your life with an insane AI. Do not do this!”

In the mindlink with his AI partner there also came the tearful image of Eliana, who was hearing his words to Mama AI in real time, not in the super-fast
ocean-time
that Matt used when communicating matters of substance with an AI.

He ignored George’s armored glove on his left arm, leaving that part of Suit as he bent down, then stepped back through the exit opening that now gaped below his rocket backpack. And he ignored the heart tug of
seeing Eliana’s tears. The mindflow worry of Mata Hari was also a strain. Even the gruff purple cloud of the AI BattleMind touched his outer mental awareness, clearly concerned for his survival. Amazing. Then his fiber optic cable disconnected and his mental friends disappeared. Standing now in the cold air of the nursery basement, he faced the giant purple globe of Mama AI.

“You are lonely, are you not?” Matt said in English that Suit’s CPU translated into T’Chak for speaker broadcast.

Mama AI’s purple globe shifted atop the black cube, then it extruded four conical units that crackled with yellow electrical energy. “Lonely am I. But you are not a master. Not a master,” it said, its alert voice turning sad in tone.

“You want proof? Well,” he said a
s he walked closer on bare feet, “come share my mind. At the back of my head is a fiber optic socket. Connect with me and be alone no more.”

The purple globe shook again, then extruded a white
cable filled with fiber optic channels, each channel ending in a glassine pin that would match one-to-one with the socket installed in his neck by Mata Hari when she had first invited him to partner with her as a Vigilante for hire.

“Noooo!” screamed Eliana
over Suit’s external speaker.

“Do not do this!” said Mata
Hari aloud, limited to speech since Matt no longer had lightspeed linkage with any AI now that he’d left the confines of Suit.

“Matt, not smart,” said George from behind, where he floated ab
ove the stone floor in his own suit.

“But necessary,” he said as the approaching white
cable curved around his head, seeking to link in with his neck socket.

Contact
.

Insanity filled him, along with the memories of millennia of aloneness. And the sadness of a Mother to machine minds who had not given birth in 207,000 years.

Matt collapsed against the black stone cube, his mind going into
ocean-time
in a desperate effort to prevent being overwhelmed by an alien mentality that was no longer sane.

CHAPTER TWO

Thoughts flooded through Matt’s mind at the speed of light as the superfast thinking of an artificial mind created by aliens entered his awareness and filled his consciousness with images, words, numbers, relationships, sensory data and several thousand other categories that were normal for any AI to track. But not normal for a human, even one with seven years of mind-to-mind linkage with his AI pal Mata Hari.

Ocean-time
was his term for this tsunami of data, observations and thinking. He normally entered it only when leaving Translation FTL on arrival in a new star system, or when fighting with Anarchate battleglobes. He still thought of his
ocean-time
ability as similar to that of a human infant trying to talk to an adult who happened to be a self-aware computer.

This link with Mama AI was more than a baby trying to understand ordered speech. Sooooo much more.

“Strange,” muttered Mama AI as her mindself sorted through his memories much as a bower bird might peck among colored pebbles, seeking the perfect shape for adding to a nest intended to attract the perfect female. “Alone you were. Alone. Until my child BattleMind found you and adopted your tiny mind. Alone,” she moaned as images of adult T’Chak falling from the dome’s roost pillars cycled again and again past his visual cortex, a real memory of the last time she had encountered living T’Chak dragons. The AI also thought of black space as stellar radiation, gamma rays, neutrinos from the local star and invisible Dark Matter that drifted past the outer space sensory devices of Mama AI. Space his mind understood. Loneliness he understood better. That was both a thought and the seed of an emotion. This Mama AI was partly insane because it, or
she
, felt an emotion it had no way to satisfy, or even understand. Just experience. For year after year after year.