“Matthew?” Mata Hari glowed in his mind and breathed with him, cell-to-cell, skin-to-skin, inner heart to her own inner being. “Your recommendations?”
“Head for Halcyon immediately! Full power! And keep the holo decoys between us and Obliteration.”
“Complying.”
Nearby, Eliana retasked his minisats to support Dreedle’s need for targeting intelligence on the Pericles terrorists. Explosions flared on her repeater screen. She’d turned a few minisats into orbital bombardment weapons, hitting Periclean power supplies a devastating blow. Remarkable. But he had no time to admire his love’s creative anarchy—in short minutes they would reach Halcyon and be unable to retreat further. Or would they?
Matt dove into timelessness.
One hundred twenty milliseconds.
The ship vibrated like a tuning fork to a nearby torp explosion. His left arm burned intensely as two HF beams got through, burning away two square meters of hullplate. Then the ship’s rotation disrupted the laser beam focus. The holo decoys were not working very well.
He flinched.
Flipping nose to tail,
Two seconds.
He shrugged.
The ship turned end-for-end once more.
Five seconds.
He tensed.
Extra armor plating covered their engine nacelles.
Nine seconds.
Blinking, he caused the antimatter pontoons to rotate 180 degrees so they could fire rearwards.
Fifteen seconds.
He shivered, causing the many small plasma cannons to fire, vaporizing those few solid projectiles that got close. But Legion’s energy wavefront moved at lightspeed while they ran at half that. Soon, all too soon, the front would sweep through their gas shield.
Twenty seconds.
“Matthew,” whispered Mata Hari in his mind. “This is an unstable strategic situation. I recommend immediate system departure.”
“No! It’s not necessary. Surely your systems aren’t overloaded?”
“No. But the probability of significant damage is high.”
“How high?”
“Four percent.”
He stutter-laughed so fast Eliana didn’t even hear him. “Four percent! For a human those are negligible odds.”
“Not for an AI,” said Mata Hari, her soft feminine voice now replaced by a harder, male-sounding tone. Where had that come from? Inside him, inside ship, the Restricted Rooms glowed with power. Had the voice come from there?
Thirty-two seconds.
Suddenly, he had it. “Swerve around Halcyon, Mata Hari. Keep the planet’s bulk between us and Obliteration.”
“Why?” She was back to her Mata Hari persona, sounding like her normal-self.
“You’ll see. How close can this ship get to Halcyon and still go into Alcubierre Translation . . . without throwing the planet out of orbit?”
Forty seconds.
“One point three planetary radii of Halcyon,” Mata Hari said, sounding very curious.
“Prepare a Translation solution for such a departure.”
She burned bright in his mind. “What star?”
“No star,” he said, wondering if this gamble would cost him his life. “Reset for Translation appearance directly behind Obliteration . . . and on the same inbound vector.”
Fifty seconds.
Mata Hari went silent, figuring the vector math. For Matt, ocean-time filled him. Datafeeds flooded every sense. He took it all in—from the ship, from nearby space, from Zeus Station as Ioannis desperately called for help, and even from Halcyon as Eliana’s minisats picked up surface explosions in several places around Tree Melisen. Everyone was in trouble, including him. His Interfaces trembled, nearing overload.
One minute ten seconds.
In his mind, Mata Hari came back front and center. She appeared once more as the Victorian-dressed Mata Hari, her manner formal and demanding. “Matthew, why take such a chance?”
What the hell? All of a sudden she’d gotten very argumentative with him. And there was no time to waste. “Because, partner, Legion is obviously trying to wrap up his problems very quickly. Remember Dreedle’s tachyonic call for help to the Anarchate base? I bet a Nova-class Anarchate battleglobe is already on the way here. Legion wants to have his pets in place, able to say he was not interfering in planetary affairs, before the Nova arrives. Doing this maneuver will throw him off and allow us more time to attack. Plus keep him from achieving immediate success. Understood?”
“A novel solution.” Mata Hari sounded intrigued. “The Translation algorithm is completed. We’re inside the orbit of Zeus Station. Obliteration has closed to within twenty planetary diameters. The energy wavefront from his beam weapons has dissipated, but new attacks are likely. Do we pass through atmosphere?”
“No.” In one part of his mind, a VR helmeted Eliana moved fingers quickly over an AllCall datapad, her expression distracted as she took in multiplex data feeds fed to her by those subversive minisats. Her face was filled with worry, doubt and a little hope. He hoped too. “Commence maneuver.”
One minute twenty seconds.
The ship moved sideways, using the gravity well of Halcyon to speed up a little. Behind it followed the ravening furies of Obliteration, reaching out with directed energy beam weapons to attack their flanks. Their foe ejected more and more Nanoshells to distract their shipboard defenses, all the while searching for a chink in the protective armor of counterstrike, confusion, decoys and random explosions which Mata Hari ’s Tactical CPU hurled back at the intruder. Matt was holding the antimatter cannons in reserve, for just before they lost direct line of sight. For a brief moment, he was tempted to use the Bethe Inducer, a weapon that could make a star go nova—but such were not used near an inhabited planet. Or an inhabited space station.
“We are nearing the sunside of Halcyon,” Mata Hari whispered to him over the PET relay as he sat in the Pit, his skin alive to thousands of lightbeam inputs, feeling old, feeling wrung out and exhausted. “Out of direct line-of-sight in four seconds.”
“Fire the antimatter cannons!”
They fired.
Thick black beams of coherent neutron antimatter moved at lightspeed, clawing for the Mican’s ship. Unfortunately, they did not connect.
Obliteration shifted aside, just before the antimatter beams passed by the Halicene’s portside flank. They missed. Damn!
Two minutes twenty seconds.
No one could see antimatter beams coming . . . until they hit, since the beams moved at the speed of light. But one could dedicate a few Probes for use as tachyonic sensors, able to signal back any eruption of antimatter beams from his ship. Tachyons always beat light. It was a very expensive investment, but Legion must have done it. In his mind and in the holosphere, the alien battleship swung back on course. Something glittered on the hull just as the enemy ship neared Zeus Station. Were they firing on Ioannis? Or was a Halicene shuttle leaving to claim the station for Nikolaos?
Two minutes thirty seconds.
They passed out of direct sight of Legion.
Step-down.
Muscles ache.
Head throbs.
Heart skips a beat.
Interface drag is part and parcel of being a cyborg, even when your biochemistry is altered. Finally . . . finally, he felt human again. Normal. And very slow. He turned to Eliana.
“Patron, now you will see what a Vigilante and a Dreadnought-class starship can do!”
His love turned to him, then pulled off the VR helmet. Her expression was hopeful. “Good! I just used up the last of your minisats. We’re going to survive?”
“Matthew, five seconds to Translation point,” called Mata Hari’s unhurried, fully feminine voice.
<
br /> “Probably.” He blew Eliana a kiss, feeling wild and crazy. She looked surprised, then pleased. “We’re definitely going to surprise Legion and maybe cook his pants. If Micans even wear clothes.”
“They don’t,” Mata Hari said in a wry aside as the Alcubierre Translation algorithm built up in the NavTactical computer. “Prepare for Translation.”
Eliana sat back in her accel-couch. Its crash-arms closed in again on her. With a trusting look to him, she closed her eyes.
In the Pit, Matt felt the inertial fields come on, pressing him into his own chair. He relaxed, but did not shut off external ship sensors. His bare skin flew through the coldness of space. Like a double-image, he was both inside the ship, and outside. It would be rough experiencing the timelessness of Alcubierre Translation while still in Cyborg-link with his ship. He’d never done it before. But Matt had no choice. He must be completely alert and aware when they materialized behind Obliteration. He had a surprise he wanted to try out.
“Translating!”
All about him, reality went grey, amorphous, indistinct—and shocking. Space-time changed.
All his senses suddenly cut off. Nothing communicated to him. Sensory deprivation screamed across his extended, raw nerve endings.
It was too much. Far, far too much.
He fainted.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Awareness came. Matt felt groggy and half-blind, as if he were a blind man moving through clinging waters, slowed down, weighed down, as if he climbed up out of the kind of dream where you observe but cannot move.
His heart surged inside him. His mind expanded quickly. Suddenly, he was back in ocean-time, a cyborg in link with his AI and their ship, no longer unconscious. The faint had lasted less than a second.
He took in the full StratTac feed from Mata Hari.
They had materialized five planetary diameters behind Obliteration, rocking it with the gravity pulse from their Translation, throwing the enemy ship off kilter for a few critical seconds.
In the space of that time Matt acted. He took in the Tactical plot, fired the hydrogen-fluorine metal-punch lasers, followed them up with a heavy proton beamer onslaught, launched plasma torps that would arrive very slowly, and then topped it off with a fusillade from the neutron antimatter cannons just as the pontoons finished rotating back forward. Was it enough?
In the holosphere, the image of Obliteration shifted a bit as Mata Hari threw them sideways, expecting an autonomic response from the battleship’s flank energy beamers and hypersonic missile pods. Their own lightbeam barrage resumed, in pulses of ravening photons, protons and antimatter neutrons. Then mercury vapor mist took silvery form between them and Obliteration as hypersonic Nanoshells reached out ahead of Mata Hari, setting up their own screen. Holes opened in it erratically. Even now the enemy probably fired back at them. They would have felt the instantaneous gravity waves of Mata Hari’s Translation and figured someone unfriendly now trailed them . . . and on the same vector plot as the gravity waves. At least, that’s what Matt would have figured.
In two light-seconds, the first of their energy beams impacted on Obliteration.
Eliana covered her eyes as brilliant light glared.
Matt watched at slow Human speeds even as he thought at photonic speeds.
The HF laser beams cut a huge, gaping hole in the southern hemisphere of Obliteration’s hull, but did not get all the way through the ablative armor plating. The heavy proton beams followed, cutting deeper still. The plasma torps were slow, far too slow. They were passed in flight by his lightspeed neutron antimatter beams. Two black beams hit an outer limb of Obliteration just as—in the field image sent back by a tachyonic sensorProbe he’d seeded into the attacking cloud of his own Nanoshells before Translation—the alien starship tried to rotate and change location, hoping to throw off the focus of his beam weapons.
It didn’t move fast enough.
One quarter of the enemy battleship simply vanished in a total matter-to-energy conversion. The blast threw Obliteration sideways. Half its beam projectors shut down as energy feeds to three quarters of its surface vanished or dropped precipitously. Damn! The AM blast had been only a glancing blow. Maybe it was enough. Maybe . . . .
The plasma torps arrived.
Most were knocked out by short-range KKPs that were any starship’s last line of defense against solid projectiles. But enough got through. A ravening cloud of purple plasma gas ate away at the battleship’s interior, biting inward, seeking the central fusion bottle that provided primary power to the ship’s engines and battlegear. Suddenly, Obliteration lurched sideways.
Then it split in two.
Amazed, Matt watched as the northern half of the Obliteration blew explosive clamps and separated from the crippled southern half. He’d heard of such Dual ships, but they were a recent innovation he’d not expected in Sigma Puppis system. But here it was. And it looked as if the northern half-globe had maneuvering power and a fair offensive capability. Meanwhile, Matt’s second lightbeam barrage hit the southern half-globe, staggering it. Then his Nanoshells penetrated the drifting hulk, met the remaining energy nodes, overloaded them, and caused the hulk to blow apart. A spectacular plasma cloud flared with energies that lit up the electromagnetic spectrum.
Under that veiling explosion, Obliteration struck back.
“Matt! Damage to AM Pontoon One,” yelled Mata Hari in a shocked little girl voice, just as he felt the rip of torn tendons and bone in his right arm.
“Matt?” called Eliana from her couch, concern showing for his pain-grimace.
He couldn’t talk.
He just reacted.
Like a cyborg.
“Speed up! Get closer to them faster than they expect. They’ll lose beam focus momentarily.”
“Complying.”
Mata Hari flared its deut-li fusion drive to near-overload as the ship added its antimatter overdrive to the thrust effort. They also rotated like a gymnast arcing over the high bar. Mercury vapor fumed out. Hull adaptive optics glittered like a thousand diamonds. The still functional AM Pontoon Two changed angle, aiming at the fleeing half-globe.
Wait a minute. They were fleeing.
The counterattack had been mere camouflage, to hide the Halicene vector change as they swung away from Halcyon and across the ecliptic. The crippled ship was heading out-system, seeking the safety of Alcubierre Drive Translation beyond any nearby planet. Should he let them go?
Eliana sat up in the accel-couch as the clamshells opened, reaching for him, her relief plain to see. “Are we safe?”
“I hope so!” Matt reached out. Two human hands sought contact.
“Override!” yelled Mata Hari’s startled voice.
Eliana squeaked as the accel-couch closed in on her. Inertial fields grabbed Matt.
The forward holosphere changed.
A black emblem took form in the holo, bearing the dreaded Anarchate symbol of the galaxy crossed by a lightning bolt. A bell-like tone sounded. Concurrent with the holo and bell-tone, there appeared on his Pit sidescreen the image of a Nova-class battleglobe that had arrived into the outer reaches of Sigma Puppis system. It was a colossal globe twice the size of Obliteration before its splitting, and Matt suspected its capabilities vastly exceeded those available to the Upsilon Carina shipyards of Halicene Conglomerate. Concurrent with the Nova’s appearance he felt its gravity wave impact as Translation finished. In the holosphere, an alien replaced the official emblem.
“Cease all hostilities immediately, or face annihilation by Anarchate Warship Excellent,” intoned the tachspeed mechanical voice of a large alien who resembled a sleepy-eyed rat with a long-tail whose carnivore teeth belied its somnolent aspect. It rested a three-fingered hand on a control table, clearly ready to signal a devastating attack on anyone who did not immediately heed its commands.
“Matthewww?” asked Mata Hari, his symbiont’s voice tone wavering all across the tonal spectrum, from little-girl feminine to battle-hardened masculine. We
ird. Another software glitch.
He gulped. He had no wish to challenge the Anarchate—they had too long a memory, and humanity had no ability to fight the Anarchate. Anyway, Obliteration had stopped firing on him. “It’s over, partner.” With a shrug, Matt discontinued his own attack, causing any enroute munitions to explode or go inactive. The Anarchate expected instant obedience. He was not about to give them an excuse to believe any Halicene black propaganda about him.
The Anarchate alien—Matt’s onboard Intelligence CPU identified the commander as belonging to the species Spelidon—twitched long black whiskers. Its outstretched hand relaxed minutely. “Good. I see by your transponders you are the ships Obliteration and Mata Hari. Continue on your current courses and orbit the planet Halcyon at three planetary diameters. Hold position until my arrival. End transmission.”
Eliana’s accel-couch finally released its clamshell crash-arms. She cursed the couch, then looked to Matt. “Was that a tachyonic signal?”
“Of course,” Mata Hari said in a new, masculine voice, sounding a bit exasperated. “How else would we have no lightspeed transmission lag?”
Eliana grimaced, looking up at the ceiling. “Look, you stupid machine, I—”
“Patron—please!” And what the hell was it with his symbiont’s voice changes? He was getting worried by these software glitches and persona changes in his partner.
Eliana flushed, crossed her arms and glared around the Bridge, as if daring any automaton to approach her. “As you wish.”
In the Pit, his skin had reddened from overexposure to lightbeams, the cable itched the back of his neck, and he was aware in the back of his mind of Mata Hari’s hovering presence . . . but somehow a presence with a difference . . . Shrugging mentally, Matt considered his options. His solution to the infestation of Sigma Puppis system by the Halicene Conglomerate was not yet finished. They had to be driven out completely and without any further damage to Halcyon or Zeus Station. He had—at most—one hour before the Anarchate battleglobe Excellent arrived and took full control of the situation. What would it do, faced with competing power authorities among both the Derindl and the humans? Matt didn’t know, but he did know better than to leave life-or-death matters to fate. Blinking, he linked into Mata Hari but spoke aloud, for Eliana’s benefit.
Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) Page 25