Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3)

by King, T. Jackson

  “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 stairway. 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 voice 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 as 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 above 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.

  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 new 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 George 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 massive 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?”