George’s AI Inevitable, who showed the mind image of a female T’Chak dragon, flapped her wings. “Yes! That five-ship cluster maximizes our firepower while protecting each ship from thermonuke overload. And with each Cohort leader making sure her fifty ships do not fire at a fellow Ocean Fleet member, we are able to rapidly reduce the automated remotes, sleds and torps that will be launched by any battleglobe.”
Eliana admired the efficiency of this formation in her mind’s-eye as the gathered AIs arranged their 500 ships into a simulation that shot out black antimatter beams and colorful laser beams as the whole cluster moved at speed toward a planetary target. She thought such a fleet tactical arrangement would allow them to swiftly reduce any pre-positioned sensors and armaments, like those Matt had faced at the Halicene shipyard. That would allow Matt and the inner core of Hexagon Prime to focus its firepower on the decimation of battleglobes, shipyards, installations and moon-based tachnet nodes.
“Outstanding Suzanne!” she said in shared mindvoice.
“A useful tactic,” rumbled Cohort leader BattleMate.
“Highly efficient,” whistled Imperial, the neuter Cohort leader.
“I like it!” whistled Melody, a Cohort leader who had chosen the mind-shape of a female T’Chak dragon.
Eliana felt the soft mental touch of Altuna, whose persona shape was that of a male T’Chak dragon every bit as large as BattleMind. But Altuna carried a sense of wisdom gained over millennia of star traveling. “Yes, Altuna?”
“The Morrigan corvette nears our spatial locus. Who . . . which of you Battle Council members will greet it?”
“I will,” Eliana said. “As Matt’s representative within Ocean Fleet, I should meet these forty-three volunteers. But each of you, humans and AIs all, are welcome to mindwatch my greeting via our tachnode linkage.”
“Sounds great,” said Suzanne as she and Lorelei mentally withdrew from the Strategy Council, their mind presence dwindling to that of a small blue cloud on Eliana’s mental horizon.
“Always hated admin work,” grumbled George as he and Inevitable also retreated mentally. “Hope you survive it!”
Melody, the T’Chak female whose black dragon wings seemed to fill Eliana’s mental space, fixed two red eyes on Eliana. “Was that George statement an example of what organics call humor?”
Restraining her giggles from going acoustic, Eliana gave the Cohort leader a friendly smile. “Yes, Melody, it was. But even we organics sometimes do not understand some humor expressions.”
“Then why speak at all if you cannot be precise?”
Eliana laughed out loud. “Because we organics find humor in all parts of the natural world. Such as the humor question of ‘Why does the Milky Way galaxy rotate its arms in a clock-wise fashion?”
“Why?” asked Melody in a calm voice only slightly stronger than a tornado.
“So the galaxy can keep from becoming curdled!”
Melody’s mind image vanished, as did those of the other Cohort leaders.
Well! Guess there was room for these T’Chak AIs to learn something new! Standing up and stepping out of her Interlock Pit, Eliana checked her hair in a reflective part of the Bridge wall. Next to her glowed Altuna’s giant dragon shape in a nearby holo. While the crocodile snout of Altuna did not allow Eliana to ‘read’ the obvious mood of her AI partner, she got the sense that Altuna did indeed understand the simple humor of her joke, but felt it beneath his wisdom to comment.
Together the two of them strode into the Spine hallway, heading for the mid-belly cargohold and their ship’s shuttle, the Jocelyn Bell. Eliana would don her full combat suit before leaving in the shuttle, a rule of Matt’s that she enjoyed obeying. She loved the eye-blink control of the suit’s shoulder laser cannons, let alone the nerve gas dispensers on its waist. While she would toss back her helmet once inside the corvette and facing the volunteers, she would allow suit to remain on Alert status. It was a smart thing to do. And anyway, if she and Suzanne were to outshoot Matt at their weekly armory practice, she had to get in her time in suit!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sarah Vasiliades stared intently at the combat suited form of Eliana Themistocles, a woman she had admired during their refugee flight from Omega Casino to Morrigan planet. Now, the woman she had admired looked like a feminine version of Matthew the Vigilante. Had her personality also changed?
“Hey Sarah!” called Eliana’s voice from the combat suit’s external speakers. “I missed you!” Her friend paused as she noticed how the pilot volunteers seemed uncertain about how to relate to an armored giantess. Eliana stood just inside the airlock that connected their corvette with the Altuna. The woman who’d treated Sarah like a sister slapped the side of her armored helmet, causing it to hinge backward to lie against the white flexarmor of the suit. She smiled broadly. “Hey! I’m human. Or mostly if you don’t count my prehensile tail!”
Sarah chuckled, heard a dozen other people laugh or chuckle, then walked up to Eliana, who stood a half meter taller than her thanks to the combat suit. “Eliana! So great to see you again! Uh, do I hug your waist? Or will that set off the nerve gas dispensers?”
Eliana’s left hand gauntlet slapped her forehead, lightly, even as her friend’s right arm gripped Sarah’s waist and effortlessly lifted her up for a ‘soft’ hug, face to face. “Is this better, boss lady?”
The deep green eyes of the old Eliana who’d spent long hours in the Commune Hall with her, other Omega Casino managers and more than a hundred other human refugees from Matt’s destruction of the casino, looked the same as before. Sarah ignored how it felt to be held in mid-air, and reached up to push a lock of Eliana’s soot-black hair away from her white forehead. “Hey, sister, you look good. But this combat suit look is new to me. And I think a surprise to other folks here who recall you from our first trip to Morrigan.”
Eliana gently set Sarah on the corvette’s gravplates, gave a nod to the Morrigan captain-pilot who’d spent the last three days convoying them out to an empty space that lay far beyond the heliopause of Dagda star, then faced the watching eyes of her fellow volunteers. “First off, I am Eliana Themistocles, a crossbreed of human and Direndl parentage from planet Halcyon, out at Sigma Puppis system. My lifepartner, Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux, is on his way here after delivering another blow to the Anarchate. You, all of you, saw the news coverage of our rescue of the Morrigan citizens who were captured by a genome slaver ship. Then it seemed like half the planet turned out for dancing, drinking and wild party-making!”
Everyone laughed at that. Including one of her fellow casino refugees. Rafael Dominguez, husband of her fellow manager Rebecca. He stepped forward before other people could.
“Eliana, protector of children, I told my wife Rebecca someone from our family must join this crusade against cloneslavery!” The black-haired, thirty-something man who’d done structural consulting for the casino at home while Rebecca worked at a casino office, held up his right hand. “I volunteered. Rebecca could not refuse me. Anyway, as you may recall, my temper is calmer than Rebecca’s!”
Sarah laughed with Eliana as both recalled the time she and Matt had hurried to the roomsuite occupied by the Dominguez family, a roomsuite that had been penetrated by a laser beam that fortunately did not harm anyone. But it had scared the children and Rebecca. Who’d given Matt a piece of her mind. “Eliana, I’ve been taking spatial dimensions class work with Rafael,” she said. “He was more patient with our expert program than I was!”
Several dozen Morrigan men and women pushed forward toward them, overfilling the central aisle that ran the length of the cargohold of the Morrigan corvette. Before she could say something, Sarah saw Eliana nod to the captain-pilot, tap her earpiece, then speak too softly for her to hear. But in less than a second all gravity had vanished as the gravplates were shut off by the Morrigan pilot. While her stomach clenched, she realized Eliana had chosen three dee disorientation over people being trampled.
“Calmness, folks!”
Eliana spoke loudly over her suit’s speaker. “Remember that there is no real up or down or whatever. What matters is your vector and your objective. If you wish to get closer to me, kick in the opposite direction. If you suddenly have to empty parts of your anatomy, kick away from me toward the lavatory amidships. Uh, there is gravity inside there!”
Sarah enjoyed how Eliana had quickly seen the problem, devised a solution, communicated the fix to the person able to make a change, then moved now to reassure and give guidance. Her friend’s growth in people management said her wearing of the combat suit was for more than show. And it told her that coming here, to be joined mentally with the self-aware mind of a T’Chak dreadnought warship, had been the right choice. While she had never served in any military or police service, she was good at organizing. And at contributing to the efficient working of any organization. Including fleet maneuvers that involved deadly destruction carried out in short seconds of optical neurolinking with the alien AI that controlled each T’Chak warship.
Eliana looked down at her. “Sarah, I see you hooked a foot under the seat of that couch-chair. Stable already, I see. Ready for your training with George and Suzanne? If you do well, I suspect Matt would welcome you in as the eighth member of the Hexagon Prime fleet.”
Her heart filled with caring and love for Eliana, a professional woman who understood Sarah’s need to be valued for more than her gender or her platinum Standards. “I’m ready. Are we assigned to a particular warship yet?”
Eliana smiled at five Morrigan citizens all trying to claim her attention simultaneously, then looked Sarah eye-to-eye. “Oh yes. Every pilot has already been assigned a warship for partner training. We expect everyone to survive basic pilot training and spatial maneuvers. For you, I think Cohort leader Imperial will do. You represented every human before the casino’s annual Owner’s Ball. While Imperial has a mindsense of straight-forward logic. I think the two of you will match up quite nicely!”
George had come to enjoy being in optical neurolink with Inevitable, even though the female T’Chak dragon always seemed impatient to be doing something. Anything. In this case, having all 506 Dreadnought starships engage in simultaneous movement as everyone worked to emulate Suzanne’s three dee phalanx maneuver that allowed for a combined offense and defense arrangement of Ocean Fleet. He lay at the center of Hexagon Prime, with six other ships revolving around him as he pretended to be Matt in starship Mata Hari. Suzanne, Eliana, Sarah in Imperial, Rafael in BattleMate and the AIs Gondu and Flowering rotated about his ship Inevitable. Beyond them were a hundred clusters of five ships each, with each cluster sending out weak but colorful laser beams to emulate an attack in six spatial dimensions.
“Pay attention, George!” grumbled Inevitable as she filled the Bridge’s front holosphere with purple dots that represented Anarchate battleglobes.
“I am!” he said, even as he admitted to the distraction of wondering why Matt had not already arrived at Morrigan. Even though he and his human allies were not in ocean-time superfast neurolink mode, still, sitting in his glass chair in the Interlock Pit and mind-sorting through dozens of neurolink and visual inputs was challenge enough. “Hey, none of us have the seven years of neurolink with you AIs that Matt has!”
The green mindglow of Inevitable brightened. “It shows. Though the target destruction of Suzanne and Eliana is nearly perfect, thanks to their psychic precognition!”
George knew he shouldn’t feel envious of his lifepartner, or her girlfriend. The two women had become as adept in full combat suit activity as he, and they often beat his combat shooting score. He liked to tease them that their psychic abilities gave them an unfair advantage. But in truth their combat suit work and shooting scores reflected native abilities. Just meant he had to work harder!
“Thanks Inevitable,” he said, leaving mental distractions behind and focusing on the tachlink ‘feel’ of the mental linkage of Sarah and forty-two other human pilot volunteers as each of them worked in optical neurolink with the T’Chak AI that ran most ship functions. “Each cohort is avoiding cross-fire on other warships while maintaining a nice targeting of laser beams at the nanoRemotes, Offense sleds, tachRemotes, battleglobe holo decoys and shuttle Jocelyn Bell.”
Inevitable spread her black wings even as red beams from her eyes took out several tachRemotes and her long tail vanquished three Offense sleds that imitated thermonuke carriers. “You humans are so much slower than we AIs, but your intuition and your human sneakiness abilities are welcome additions to our battle matrix.”
In his mind’s-eye and in the holo, Sarah and her ship Imperial destroyed targets in all six spatial dimensions, firing simulated antimatter cannons at four battleglobe decoys, while hitting sensorRemotes, tachRemotes and Offense sleds within nanoseconds of each other. He and Inevitable were doing similar attacks along multiple spatial vectors, even as their ship moved to become part of the outer rotating ring and Eliana’s ship Altuna moved to the center of their Hexagon Prime combat ring. Farther out, other fleet members formed a cloud of always moving, always firing and always striking warships that bored ahead through a simulated whirlwind of stationary and mobile targets. Their target was an orbital shipyard that was being played to perfection by Eliana’s shuttle Jocelyn Bell. How Matt’s lifepartner managed to split her mind into two segments, one focused on her ship’s actions and the other segment focused on firing shuttle lasers at the approach of the fleet, amazed him.
“It’s just part of me,” came the calm mindvoice of Eliana. “Back home on Halcyon I had to pretend to be human-normal while growing up, even as the Direndl part of my nature told me to run and hug the nearest Mother Tree branch.” Her albino white face smiled at the memory echo. “Pretending to be one person while existing as another person is normal. For me. And for dear Mata Hari, as you may recall from her Lady of the Sword persona during the genome harvester raid.”
“Watch out, George!” called Suzanne’s mindvoice.
A thermonuke sled had just dropped its stealth camouflage directly in front of the vector he was following toward the shuttle. The sled activated its deut-li fusion pulse drive, then seemed to jump toward him as the sled dumped antimatter into its exhaust. It would impact his front Alcubierre space-time shield within a second. Unless he acted.
“Right wing AM cannon, hit that target!” he mentally ordered one of his ship’s antimatter cannons. “CO2 and HF lasers, fire at a ring of space lying just outside the sled’s position, in case other sleds are hiding in stealth!”
A blue-white blast of total matter-to-energy annihilation filled the front holo and his mind as the AM cannon blast impacted, while thousand megawatt laser pulses drove through the outflowing gases in search of hidden targets. One part of his mind noticed two eddies in the outflow of AM blast gases. With a thought he re-aimed two hydrogen-fluoride lasers to target those eddies. Smaller explosions happened almost immediately given the lightspeed nature of his weapons and his optical neurolinking with his partner.
“Well done!” said the soft voice of Inevitable. “I and several other AI partners had computed you organics might try to sneak in other stealth-hidden thermonuke sleds that would be partially covered by the gases of the first sled’s destruction.”
George noted in one part of his mind that the fleet warships had encountered nineteen similar hide-the-sled efforts by the group of fleet AIs who were guiding the Anarchate Defense effort. In three cases the central warship missed detecting the hidden sleds and was impacted by 30 megaton blasts. Simulated of course. But even though the nose shields dropped in those cases, the encircling warships extended their own nose shields to cover the center ship’s missing Alcubierre shield. And the extension happened within five femtoseconds. The fourteen other cases of stealthed sleds resulted in their destruction by protective cross-fire or impacts from the fleet’s own thousands of nanoRemotes that could impact a hidden ship, tachlink-signal that data to a nearby T’Chak warship, and have the hidden sled destroyed even though the nanoRemote
s did not survive impact. George felt new amazement at how a battle could begin and finish in tiny parts of a second. Thank god for tachlink!
“Agreed, George,” murmured Inevitable as the white teeth of her snout closed around a cluster of sensorRemotes. “If we did not have the ability to see enemy vector changes that are instantly reported to us by our tachlink Remotes, we could be damaged.”
Recalling the loss of Ocean AI, and the more recent death of a cloneslave woman captive during Matt’s attack on the Halicene shipyard, George felt grimness settle in his gut. While he, Matt, Suzanne, Eliana, Sarah, Rafael and their Morrigan allies had the advantage of superior warships thanks to T’Chak superweapons, still, they could be hurt. And the Anarchate had more than eleven thousand battleglobes in their Combat Command. While most Anarchate military forces were spread around the five arms of the Milky Way, still, their effort to overthrow a two million year-old galactic system was audacious. Or insane, according to their opponents Chai and Yorkel. And perhaps to many alien cultures that had known only the existing anarchy of the Anarchate. After all, if the Anarchate leaves your planet alone except for the payment of annual taxes, while your species can travel the galaxy selling one’s assets, why seek change?
Eliana’s mindvoice broke into his ruminations. “George, you know why we have to fight this battle. See this image from Matt’s memory of working as a cloneslave decanter?”
An image of a alien fetus filled George’s mind. It was one of dozens held in placental tubes that Matt and other decanters worked to extract. So the cloneslave infants could be made into perfect servants for whomever bought them. He understood Matt’s choice to work in order to survive. And survive he had. Taking up the job of being a Vigilante for hire, to help bring some degree of justice and hope to isolated planets and peoples, was Matt’s early way of fighting against the Anarchate. It was a commercial anarchy created by the sixteen interstellar corporations whose members made up the Council of Sixteen. Those sixteen beings never left the Central Nexus admin planet of the Anarchate, a place lying deep within Norma Arm that was heavily defended. For now, Ocean Fleet struck at the installations of Sector Fourteen, which included segments of Norma, Scutum-Crux, Sagittarius, Orion and Perseus arms. The Milky Way had long ago been split into sixteen triangle segments that speared out from the inner Core region. What he and Matt did now had upset a few of those segments. Perhaps when they attacked Sector 14 Intelligence headquarters near the Crab Nebula the lifeforms in charge would wake up to the wrongness of what they permitted.
Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) Page 18