Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) (9 page)

The
blue-eyed woman whose embroidered dresses were the template for Mata Hari’s Summer Girl persona changed in his mind to convey a sense of a corporate manager about to render a presentation to fellow managers. She looked the same, physically. But her mental image now conveyed a kind of seriousness he had felt from Mata Hari as she fought the genome slavers beside him, and perhaps the way Eliana had felt during their political battles in orbit about her home planet Halcyon, just before the Mican and the Anarchate ships had shown up. Suzanne’s long blond eyelashes blinked. “Matthew, your Eliana and I can do with each other, all the time, what we now do with you and Mata Hari via tachyonic mindlink. We did it during Translation. We even do it when we are sleeping, as shared nightmares and urgent memories told us during the trip back here.” In his mind her body image nodded sideways to the mind-shape of Eliana, then further to the Summer Girl persona of Mata Hari. “While tachlink with dispersed sensors gives you advance knowledge of where an enemy lightspeed beam will impact, allowing you to shift ship position, or to fire weapons in anticipation of their changed position, this psychic link does all that and more.”

“In what sense?” he asked, enjoying the feel of the four of them mentally relaxing on a grassy meadow, like the one in the Park habitat at the rear of the ship.

Suzanne lifted a mental hand and pushed back her long blond curls. “Uh, mind if I signal George to join us? He should know what we’ve just discussed. And the psychic tactical value I wish to share.”

Matt mentally slapped his head with a baseball bat. Stupid him to not invite in George earlier. Even as his recrimination blossomed
, the black-bearded image of George joined them on their mental grassy meadow. Like them he was nude, and sat cross-legged, though with his hands in his lap. As all of them were doing that in order to keep the mindlink from turning sensual in tone. Suzanne waved at her George, blew him a kiss, then reached over to hold his hand mentally. Which Eliana now did with Matt, conveying a sense of touch based on their months together. Mata Hari, as quick as thought, brought her AI buddy Gatekeeper into their mindlink conference. The human-like bodies of the AIs sat naked like the four of them, holding hands like the humans, and their minds were similarly focused on serious business. Suzanne looked to Matt.

“Good. Matt, you and Mata Hari have used your tachlink and
ocean-time
mindspeed abilities to destroy every Anarchate battleglobe that has gone up against us. And you adjust just as quickly to the unexpected, as happened when that proton beam slashed into the bedrooms of Rebecca and her family.” Suzanne looked around mentally, gathering in their attention. “That linkage is wonderful and we newbies are glad to be invited to join in by way of our own fiber optic sockets. And by feeling our own ship like a suit of clothes via the constant lightbeam contact with skin that happens when we walk the corridors of our ship. But being able to
anticipate
Anarchate battle moves, even to sense what might happen months ahead, will be essential to our future battles.”

“Essential?” Matt queried even as Eliana sent him a mental
For sure
statement to his mind alone.

“Essential,” Suzanne said in her Information Technologist manager voice. “
The Anarchate is alert and aware of your efforts. While a slow organism to arouse, once aroused it has tremendous resources it can deploy against us. And anywhere we are likely to appear.”

“Earth? They’re going to attack Earth!”

“No!” Suzanne said, shaking her head. “I do not sense any danger to Earth, or to Eliana’s Halcyon planet or to your birth home of Thuringia. Your assumption they will not attack homeworlds in order to avoid the suggestion that a lone renegade with a starship is any kind of threat to the Anarchate will keep them pursuing us, rather than retaliating against our homeworlds or our friends.”

“Morrigan,” Matt said. “Does your psychic sense indicate the Anarchate knows about Morrigan? And the human refugees we transported there?”

Suzanne said
No
mentally. “I do not sense any awareness of Morrigan in the future actions of the Anarchate. They employ billions of lifeforms in their Combat Command, in their land and space forces, and in their administrators like the galactic tachlink node you destroyed on Megadeen. My precog sense, and fragmentary mental images of the future, do not include the Anarchate doing anything at Morrigan. Though,” she said, pausing to smile at him, “I think your future plans for using Morrigan as part of our campaign are just great!”

Damn
. Now everyone could read his mind and his future plans and hopes. Bad enough when two T’Chak AIs do it, but to share his rather grandiose future schemes via mindlink with his human battlemates was like—

“Being naked in front of us all?” Eliana said softly, her mind carrying the tone of the Molecular Genetics field she had trained and worked in
. “Matthew, we have seen each other this way in the pond at the Park and you as you sat in the Interlock Pit. It’s nothing new to us. So being able to see, or mind-sense, your future plans is not a big deal. Actually, it makes me appreciate you even more!”

“Here, here!” growled George as he clapped his mental hands. Suzanne joined him
in clapping as did the mind images of Mata Hari and Gatekeeper.

Well,
mindlink was not something he could censor. Especially not now as he caught glimpses of Suzanne’s early life in a Swedish village on a Second Wave colony world where the young girl had been bullied and hit by young boys because of her smartness. She had even fought off two efforts to rape her when she attended a residence high school far from her parents’ home. Her training in judo and Okinawan karate had let her turn the attackers into shuddering piles of pain impulses. Blinking mentally, Matt shut off that glimpse of the deep self of Suzanne, returning to the mental here and now. In his mind he shrugged, as was his wont when caught being distracted by his father Benoit.

“Thanks. But grandiose plans for the future may not work.
To quote Sun Tzu—
He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious
. Or, as Suzanne suggests, the Anarchate may have deadly plans for us. They have a lot of smart people. And the Anarchate’s insistence on ‘Results or you die’ is a powerful motivator.”

“Matthew,” Suzanne said firmly. “They
do
have plans for us. One mind is very dangerous. It has used the six months we’ve been away from the galaxy to plan and to organize more effective responses to whatever we do in the future. Other Anarchate minds are also paying attention to us. Though the exact shape of what they plan is not clear to me since . . . since they are alien minds, rather than human minds. There is a fuzziness to my sense of aliens that is not there with a fellow human like Eliana. Or to actual events like the upcoming battle at Alkalurops. That is close enough in time for it to appear clearly.”

“And?” Matt pressed. He had solid plans for how to destroy 300 plus genome slaver starships but uncertainty had dogged him ever since he’d returned home to see his family’s farmstead burned and his sisters and parents kidnapped to serve as genome reservoirs for the creation of human cloneslaves.

“You will win,” Suzanne said softly. “We will win. But there will be surprises. And we will all cope with them.”

Well, he’d expected that. “What tactical advice comes from your advance mind view of what will happen in a few weeks?”

“Matt,” Suzanne said with a glance sideways to include Eliana. “You should just use the Hexagon Prime fleet. Eight ships will be enough to do what you plan. We should leave the other 500 T’Chak Dreadnoughts parked in deep space a light year or more away from Alkalurops. They will see what we do via their own tachlinks with our AIs. But until we gain human or alien pilots for each ship, you should leave their management in the hands of the ten AIs that Eliana and I chose to manage them. Remember our cohort arrangements?”

He remembered. It had been a surprise after awakening from the exhaustion of his
mindlink with Eternal Love, formerly Mama AI. His memory of that hurricane-size swirl of disordered and inchoate thoughts was a memory he did not wish to revisit. Far better to fight genome slaver starships as they shot lasers, proton beams, wiggler lasers and thermonuclear torps at him and his friends.

“Okay,” he said, mentally squeezing Elian
a’s hand, then nodding to the mindshapes of Mata Hari and a somber Gatekeeper. “Only the eight of us will leave the rendezvous point a few light years away from Alkalurops. Anyway, I have long believed in not showing my entire card hand to any opponent, whether AI, organic or the Anarchate. They may still think my crusade is led by only one T’Chak starship!”

“Maybe,” George said. “But even though your Hit-and-Run attacks have been nearly random and based on the Intelligence data crystal you got from the attack at SAO 47250, still, the Anarchate knows what you got from that crystal. And you left the AI alive. So for sure the weekly and monthly security and arrival codes have been changed, along with the protocol for responding to solo gravity wave pulses that show up on the outskirts of an Anarchate star system.”

“Agreed,” Matt said, standing up but still holding mental hands with Eliana. “Which is one reason I chose to head next to the space around the three star system of Alkalurops. The Anarchate naval base on the planet that hosts the Flesh Markets is long used to picking up random gravity wave pulses from the starships of labor slavers, genome harvesters, organ harvesters and their customers. The hundreds of gravity wave pulses that will be generated by our arrival will be assumed to be those of the genome slaver ships arriving for their annual coordination meeting.” He grimaced. “The Core computer on the slaver we boarded said they meet annually to assign territories, handle disputes among themselves, arrange barter prices for the genomes of high demand species, and to negotiate with the local Anarchate base commander for the amount in barter bribes each ship must pay to the Anarchate base in their operating zone. So, we will arrive just before they arrive.”

In his mind Suzanne, George, Mata Hari and Gatekeeper all nodded agreement to his attack plan. But Eliana pulled on his mental hand, drawing his focus to her lovely mind.

“Stop it, Matt! This mindlink is about more than the passion we feel for each other.”

“Agreed. My regrets.” Their partners disappeared from their joint
mind image, all except for Mata Hari who always hovered somewhere in Matt’s mind. “You have a question?”

“Yes. What about the
Flesh Markets on Alkalurops. Do we do anything about them? After we defeat the slavers?”

Matt had long thought about that during the three months of their trip from the Small Magellanic
Cloud to their pickup of the Bogean Harmony devices. He had some ideas. He had a strong feeling. But he had not made any decision.

“You are right. The market should be destroyed. But do we destroy the planet itself, with its one billion alien inhabitants and the ecosystem that includes everything from single cell microbes up to the Anarchate
governor’s palace? Or do we do less. Like I tried to do in Omega Centauri cluster, by leaving the Trade planet intact, even though the space station turned to stellar gas?”

Her deep
green eyes met his, heart to heart, mind to mind, emotion to emotion. As much as one can on this side of the spirit world, they had become one in thoughts, feelings and choices. While also staying separate, distinct and ornery individuals. “I understand now your point about learning the morality of possessing ultimate weapons and the ability to destroy whole star systems. And peoples. Not fun.”

“No, not fun,” he muttered
. “And Sun Tzu had advice on that which I try to heed—
Treat the captives well and care for them
.

Eliana nodded thoughtfully. “As we did with the Omega Casino refugees and residents. Perhaps they are already spreading word about this dangerous pirate who harms only the Anarchate, not civilians?”

“Perhaps. One can hope. Though I like having precognition on my side!”

“Suzanne and I agree.”

“Time to go to work.” On the outskirts of his mind the starships of Hexagon Prime, and the 500 other T’Chak starships that surrounded them the way a necklace encircles the neck of one’s love, those ships tachlink-connected with Mata Hari’s countdown to entering Translation. In four minutes and 34 seconds. Which required him to be present in the Interlock Pit with his mind in full
ocean-time
mindlink with Mata Hari and BattleMind.

Eliana
smiled softly. “
Vaya con dios
.” Then her mind image disappeared as she too headed for her starship’s Interlock Pit and preparations for their final Translation trip into the space near Alkalurops.

They all knew it was going to be a lonely two weeks. Except for Eliana and Suzanne. In his heart he felt a touch of jealousy that the two women could stay in
mindlink telepathically, while he, George and all future pilots of his fleet must accept only the company of the ship’s onboard AI.

“Hey, Matthew, like my gorgeous look?”

In his mind Mata Hari’s image switched from the pale skinned nudity of their meadow conference to the smooth black nakedness of the Barbarian Queen, adorned only by jewels, necklaces and gold bracelets. The AI grinned salaciously. “You know, you and I, we could mentally have a great time! Those positions you and Eliana shared that last night you were together here. I’ve got them memorized. We could—”