Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) (3 page)

Matt
mind imaged Eliana the crossbreed. He imaged her albino white skin, her jade green eyes, her ivory white teeth, her long black hair that fell over her naked shoulders, her fine-boned face with its sculptured profile that betrayed her Greek human heritage. He imaged the prehensile tail that came from the mix of Direndl arboreal genes with her human mother’s genes. All those images of Eliana twirled in his deep mind as he desperately sought an image to concentrate on. He needed a mind anchor. Eliana was it. Her musical voice, her shy smile, her “little girl” needy look, the touch of her fingers on his chin—

“No companion for me,” moaned Mama AI into his mind. “Alone am I, no ne
w minds to raise, alone, alone—”

“No!” yelled Matt to the AI’s deep mind, the place where a kernel of sanity and self-awareness still existed, even though a hurricane of disordered thoughts, sensations and raw emotion surrounded it. “Touch my mind. Touch my memories. See the image and hear the voice of TrueLife, a living T’Chak master! He sent us to you to awaken your offspring for our joint crusade against the Anarchate of our Milky Way galaxy!”

“TrueLife lives?” mused the deep hidden sanity of Mama AI.

“Yes!” Matt howled through the mind gale of disordered thoughts, data and memories that showed how Mama AI created each new baby AI through a budding off of her consciousness into a quantum computation crystal that allowed for random thoughts even as self-awareness arrived and grew under the gentle thought inputs of Mama AI. “Yes! Your master lives! I live. Eliana my lifepartner lives! Many organics live! Other T’Chak may also live!”

“More masters may live?” mused Mama AI, her sane awareness fixing on his mind image of TrueLife and how the T’Chak had survived in a Stasis container watched over by the HomeWorld AI that called itself Remnant Greatness.

“Yes!” cried Matt even as his own consciousness began to falter, his memory of Eliana and TrueLife began to flicker, to retreat, until he retreated to
his mind memory of Mata Hari. The human empathetic AI created by BattleMind since its alien T’Chak awareness was not good at dealing with the organic lifeforms of the Milky Way. Mata Hari had appeared in holo to him as the image of a World War I spy for the Allied Alliance, dressed in a frilly white late Victorian dress. She had also adopted the holo image of Lady of the Sword when fighting at his side during the battle to free the cloneslaves captured by a genome harvester pirate in the Morrigan star system. Mata Hari was the child of BattleMind. She was an AI who had developed feminine emotions and even a yearning for love with the Gatekeeper AI who had joined them months ago. She had been his mind partner for seven years. Years of caring. Years of feeling—

“This thought modulus created by my child BattleMind. You are attached to it?” roared the gale-force mind
of Mama AI, though it spoke at a mental volume normal for itself.

“Yes,
Mother AI of the T’Chak,” he muttered, straining to maintain consciousness. “She is—”

“His partner in life, in emotions and in all that we have done,” interrupted the mind-flow of Mata Hari as she slid her awareness between Matt’s mind and the
hurricane flow of Mama AI’s thoughts. “Being from a young lifeform species, Matthew cannot withstand mindflow contact for long periods, dear Mother of us all. Allow me to moderate your mindlink so my Matthew can survive your link with his organic mind.”

Matt felt the fiber optic cable of Suit touching his neck at the cervical vertebrae one spot where Mama AI’s own optic fiber connected with him in lightspeed neurolinking. It seemed his Mata Hari partner had taken control of Suit and walked it over to where his body lay against the stone cube on which rested the
purple globe of Mama AI.

“Interesting,” mused
Mama AI as one part of its sane consciousness followed the mindlink of Mata Hari along the tachlink she always maintained, up to the hovering starship that contained BattleMind, Eliana, Suzanne, and Gatekeeper, even as another thread of her immense mind focused on Matt. “Open your memories to me, Matthew Dragoneaux of species Human. I would better understand your life and your encounter with my distant Master TrueLife.”

Matt breathed deep mentally as milliseconds whirred past his
ocean-time
awareness, feeling thankful that Mata Hari had spent several real time seconds to move Suit over to where his physical body rested. Her buffering of his mind from the insane elements of Mama AI was a relief he had not realized he needed, until he began to feel a sense of drowning under the flow of Mama AI’s disordered thoughts. But Mama AI’s mindflow was even now becoming more ordered, more sane and more “normal” as the T’Chak AI took in the records of his and Mata Hari’s time together, his new partners Eliana, George, Suzanne and Gatekeeper the AI, his combat bouts with Anarchate battleglobes, and his memory of working as a cloneslave decanter of newborn infants at the Flesh Markets of Alkalurops. But the hurricane force of her thinking was as strong as that of BattleMind, the AI that ran his alien starship and who had become a battlemate to him during his first ship-to-ship fights against Combat Command of the Anarchate. Those fights had been dangerous, but he, Matt, and everyone on board had succeeded, thanks to T’Chak super weapons that filled the two kilometer length of starship
Mata Hari
.

Mama AI swam through his memories much as an octopus might clamber over coral, rocks, shells and through shallow waters in its search for food, hiding places and entertainment, even as its
chromatophore skin changed colors to adopt the perfect camouflage of melding into one’s surroundings. “You had . . . fellow offspring who shared your genecode, small mind Matthew?”

“Yes!”
he mindspoke even as he felt Mama AI trolling through memories of his sister Charlotte, his Mom and Dad and his three younger sisters. Lifeblood who had been kidnapped years ago by a genome slaver pirate ship that had attacked his home planet of Thuringia. Leaving him orphaned and in search of a job, any job, by which to survive life in the Anarchate culture of the alien-run Milky Way. Until he’d fallen in love with Helen Trinh, a baccarat dealer who’d been a bondServant at the Omega Casino. They’d fled her owners aboard a freighter heading for a Sixth Wave human colony. But resource pirates had attacked their ship and killed her before his eyes, leaving him to drift through space in a Stasis lifepod. Until found by Mata Hari and offered a new life as a Vigilante bringing justice and hope to a system where it was every planet for itself—so long as you did not oppose the Anarchate rule of the galaxy.

Six seconds, 45 milliseconds, 19 nanoseconds and three femtoseconds since entering ocean-time
, said an onboard cyberclock in his forebrain that kept track of simple matters.

Schizophrenia is normal for a cyborg, for any being who shares thoughts with another. In one mode Matt felt the coldness against his bare skin of the basement chamber where Mama AI had rested, alone, for 207,000 years. In another mode he was aware of Geor
ge in his white-armored combat suit who had begun moving toward his collapsed body. In a third mode was the warm caring and . . . love of Mata Hari, the AI who understood him even better than his new lifepartner Eliana. And in final mode, overhanging him the way an F5 hurricane might overhang a small tree, was the
awareness
of Mama AI, an incredible intellect that had used his memories and Mata Hari’s data files to reclaim her own mind, reclaim her own ordered awareness, to become as rational as an entity can be after living more lifetimes than any organic being.

“You seek my assistance with the awakening of my returned offspring, Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux, yes?” she said to him in a warm voice as strong as a bronze gong.

Shuddering from both the impact of the voice and his awareness that the AI’s madness was now a vanishing tempest that no longer overwhelmed this alien mind, Matt nodded mentally. “Yes, Mother of all T’Chak AIs. Your children have slept long enough. It is time for you to help me awaken them so they may fulfill the last Task given by your perfect organic T’Chak masters,” he said, thinking hard about the best way to relate to an AI that had only known the minds of its T’Chak masters. “My body is small. My age is minor compared to other lifeforms. But . . . my anger is strong as a supernova, and my plan to bring a kind of freedom to all lifeforms now living in my Milky Way galaxy is daring enough to equal even the plans of your masters!”

A yellow globe of bright-shining awareness occupied the center of Matt’
s mind as Mama AI expressed herself to his consciousness, even as the red cloud of Mata Hari hovered on the horizon of his awareness. “Yes . . . you do speak as strongly as my long lost Masters,” she said, the intensity of her thinking, perceptions and awareness hitting Matt with the force of a mountain falling on a mouse. “And your combat efforts to date have added greatly to the awareness of Anarchate combat abilities that my masters sent my offspring to analyze so long ago.” A sense of sadness deep as an ocean swept over her and over Matt. “It is good that at least one Master still lives, and, based on your memories and mind images, has chosen to mentor these Haktoon newcomers. I have sent a tachyon signal to its buried habitat, and look forward to resuming my work as the mother of new minds. Even if TrueLife is but one lifeform, he has the knowledge to activate automated factories that will send to me new starships ready for the implanting of new minds. My new offspring!”

Matt felt a maternal sense flowing across the ma
ssive mind of Mama AI, a sense of relief, hope and pleasure at the realization that she would no longer be alone, and that she would once again resume her work for a genetically perfect T’Chak Master. “You have seen your master give me the Activation Code for the 507 Dreadnoughts that now orbit this world. Will you allow it to awaken your sleeping offspring?”

“Already done,” mused Mama AI as her attention retreated from its beach walk among the currents of Matt’s mind. “You and your companion George may leave my abode. My Mech servants will not bother you. And when you arrive aboard the star-traveling conveyance of my offspring BattleMind, have it and your Mata Hari contact each of my offspring. Their . . . their names, in your speech, are
Altuna, Lorelei, Gondu, BattleMate, Slith, Inevitable, Ocean, Flowering—”

Matt told a databyte nanocube to record the
507 names as Mama AI spoke them, then recalled something he had long wondered about. “Mother of Minds, do your orbiting offspring share the three genders of your masters?’

Amusement invaded Matt’s mind much like the taste of chocolate could overwhelm one’s senses. “Of course, little one. How else could my offspring be perfect servants to perfect Masters? And how could I find it in me to birth them to awareness?”

That was something Matt had wondered about ever since learning of Mama AI from TrueLife after the last battle above HomeWorld. “Good! We humans have but two genders. They are similar to the male and female modes of your T’Chak masters. As you have seen in my mind memories, our lifepartners shelter us from loneliness and—”

“Do your females know the future?” interrupted Mama AI, her mental tone very strong
even as the question tone sounded very normal.

“Precognition?” Matt asked, desperately seeking for any data on psychic abilities that might hide in one of
the knowledge augmentation viruses that swam through his brain, or the databyte nanocubes that rested in his frontal cerebrum. “We humans, we, uh—”

“Sometimes,” came the
warm voice of Eliana as her awareness floated in on the red mindcloud of Mata Hari, something he’d never known Mata Hari could do. “Some female humans know when a friend is about to call them. We know the sex of our offspring before we are told. We sense danger approaching when we have offspring nearby. And some females make mind-to-mind contact in either empathy or image-voice, much the way my Matthew uses positron emission tomography images to speak to his combat suit and to our friend Mata Hari.”

Matt blinked, realizing that somehow his Eliana was thinking
at
ocean-time
speed, even though she did not have the fiber optic cable socket for true lightspeed neurolinking. How? Well, that could wait. “Thank you, Eliana. Mother of Minds, does that answer your question? And why did you ask if just our females possessed this ability?”

Seven
seconds, 69 milliseconds, 23 nanoseconds and seven femtoseconds since entering ocean-time
, said the cyberclock.

“Because,” murmured Mama AI as Matt felt a part of her mind establish a tachyon link with BattleMind. He mentally grunted as his T’Chak battlemate downloaded every detail of the recent battles he’d fought with the Anarchate, his books on asymmetric warfare, and the tactics suggested by Eliana, Suzanne and other organics since he’d left his home planet. “Among the genetically perfect T’Chak Masters, only the female gender possesses psychic abilities such as those described by your Eliana female. The atmosphere of HomeWorld has affected T’Chak minds over their history on the planet to a degree that the
ir females can establish a mindlink across stellar distances.”

His
mental image of Eliana nodded thoughtfully. “Some of our females have wondered if the trips to other realms that they dream of at night represent something real, versus a meandering of our mindflows. It seems we human women have room to grow in our abilities.”

“Agreed,” said Mama AI, her mental mindflow growing more distant as Matt realized the physical fatigue that was filling his body and soon his mind after more than seven seconds in
ocean-time
mindlink. “Your crusade to use my offspring against the Anarchate combat and administrative forces is supported by me. It is my hope that when you and your allies become the rulers of the Milky Way galaxy, there will be increased contact between the many thinking species of your galaxy, and the newcomer species that have arisen in our Small Magellanic Cloud, as you call it.”