Vigilante Series 2: Nebula Vigilante

by T. Jackson King

  “Mata Hari, where is the Anarchate battleglobe at this moment?”

  His AI partner appeared in the forward holo globe, still dressed in a white Victorian dress with a pearl bead clasp at her neck. “The Anarchate warship is now passing the sixth of this system’s eight planets, according to the pebble sensors of our decoy Remote,” she said. “Its speed is one-half lightspeed and slowing. Its approach vector is the Intelligence dome.”

  Eliana sat nearby in an accel-couch, sharing the Bridge with him and Mata Hari’s Memory Pillars home. She had hugged him as soon as he had backed out of Suit through its clamshell opening, but then understood he had combat work to do first. Later could come a visit to his private suite, the one place where he kept personal mementoes and memories. And which she shared with him as their home. She focused jade green eyes on him, her expression encouraging.

  “We beat them once,” Eliana said. “We can do it a second time.”

  Matt agreed a second victory was likely. And BattleMind surely hungered to unleash the super weapons in the Restricted Rooms. But risking the only starship capable of defeating an Anarchate warship was not done lightly.

  “You are probably right, my dearest love.” Matt turned from Eliana’s albino white face to the holo image of Mata Hari. “Partner, can you compute an in-system Translation such that we end up just behind the battleglobe?”

  His AI partner tilted her head, in a perfect human analogue of thoughtful consideration. “I can. Though the exact parameters mean we could end up very close to the Nova battleglobe, or too distant for us to fire first. Your wishes?”

  “Please compute the Translation matrix,” he said. Matt gestured to his right, causing a second holo globe to appear. Eliana sucked in her breath as she recognized his intention.

  “BattleMind, you have been monitoring our discussion and the results of my combat foray to the Intelligence dome. You have had time to review the molecular memory crystal with its data on Anarchate installations. Do you support my plan for battling the Nova battleglobe?”

  The hologlobe darkened, filled with swirling pink and yellow streamers, then cleared to present the image of a T’Chak alien. Matt gulped as he confronted a twelve foot tall, two winged, two armed, two legged and long tailed alien that resembled an Earthly dragon to a remarkable degree. The body armor plates on its spine and sides were purple-colored, while its chest and abdomen were yellow-scaled. It was the image of a real T’Chak alien. BattleMind was clearly reminding him of its duty to return home with the combat intelligence.

  “I support it,” the dragon said with a yawn of a tooth-filled, pink-tongued mouth. Two ruby-red eyes fixed on him. “Your justification for release of my Mata Hari modulus, the support of your Eliana partner, and your combat entry to the Anarchate facility have convinced me of your usefulness.” Eliana sighed, but still bit her lip. “This technique of . . . sneakiness is novel to my experience, but clearly useful in the gaining of data that would have been lost in the antimatter destruction of the facility. I agree with your plan to engage in further combat with Anarchate entities, though each segment must be discussed with me. Final control of this warship rests with me, of course.”

  “Of course,” Matt said, turning away from the T’Chak dragon and focusing on Mata Hari’s calm persona. “Partner, have your decoy Remote leave stealth and begin broadcasting as if it were us. Then, initiate the Translation to put us just behind the Nova battleglobe.”

  “Yes, Matthew,” Mata Hari said with a smile, as if she were the real human and he just a vidgame holo.

  Matt entered ocean-time, knowing he had to be in full sensory-link with the starship’s offensive weaponry the moment they reappeared behind the Anarchate battleglobe.

  The dam burst. Oceans filled him, oceans of machine-fed data filled his mind’s eye.

  The silvery tube of the ship’s flexhull shivered in space, its shapechanging ability a thing unknown to human or Anarchate shipbuilders. His back itched as directed energy weapon domes popped out onto the hull. His biceps fed power to the ship’s two antimatter cannons, which lay alongside the main hull like pontoons on an outrigger sailboat. He clenched tight his jaw muscles, bringing on-line the deuterium-lithium six fusion drive for chasing after the battleglobe. Ears listened to tachyonic comlinks, synthetic aperture and phased array radars. His eyes ‘saw’ infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays and radioactives, painting for him a non-human picture of Riemannian space. Matt sniffed. Nose smelled through subtle sensors, devices that could detect biological spores drifting through space upon ancient stellar winds. Inside his chest, his heart beat. Oh, how it beat! It beat in sync with the Alcubierre Drive that could move him and Mata Hari from one star to another in days.

  Instinct allied to emotion allied to analytical thought. Matt was a true cyborg . . . and it was time to go to work.

  Femtoseconds sped along and picoseconds felt like the ticks of an ancient mechanical clock. A nanosecond would feel like an hour, while a millisecond would feel . . . longer. He sighed, knowing there would be reentry shock when they materialized behind the battleglobe. He hoped he would not faint, as had occurred during the battle with the Nova battleglobe of Commander Chai, in Sigma Puppis B system.

  This was a gamble. But this time he knew about the super-weapons in the Restricted Rooms. And he knew how long it would take the Nova battleglobe to start up its own Bethe Inducer field in an effort to turn starship Mata Hari into a few neutron star particles. He would act decisively before that occurred. Eliana was his new love, a unique person he would never sacrifice for any reason. Nor would he betray his AI partner Mata Hari, who had rescued him from a lifepod and had remade him into a cyborg-human melding of unique abilities.

  In the Pit, Matt felt the inertial fields come on, pressing him into his 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 Drive Translation while still in cyborg-link with his ship. Matt had no choice. He must be completely alert and aware when they materialized behind the Anarchate Nova-class battleglobe. He had a surprise he wanted to try out.

  Fifteen milliseconds, pulsed his internal timelog.

  “Translating!” called Mata Hari.

  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. And pure blackness greeted the flexmetal hull’s vid sensors. His lungs wanted to gasp. His mind wanted to blank out. But anger at the uncaring nature of the Anarchate, of a galactic system that enforced anarchy among the stars because it was profitable, gave him the strength to remain aware. To be ready. To be—

  Translation ended.

  Three hundred milliseconds, said his onboard nanoBit computer.

  Matt blinked, slowly, still in ocean-time, still feeling his Dreadnought starship like a suit of clothes one wears to the first day of school. Well-fitting, but a bit . . . tight-feeling. He PET-imaged his “surprise” and hoped the battleglobe commander had not set his StratTac CPU on automatic Combat Mode. Mentally inhaling, Matt saw his new location in all its glory. And danger.

  Black space surrounded them, speckled by a few bright stars and a nebula or two. Ahead of them, just three hundred kilometers away, loomed the twelve kilometer wide hull of the Anarchate battleglobe. In less than fifty milliseconds it would detect the gravity wave pulse of starship Mata Hari behind it. Its organic commander would take a few seconds to order the Defense modalities to fire in their direction—unless the StratTac CPU was on automode.

  Three hundred twenty milliseconds.

  “Matthew,” whispered Mata Hari in his mind. “Our surprise is initiating.”

  “Thank you, partner, for a perfect Translation placement,” he PET replied.

  Matt watched as, per his PET thought-image, both the
right and left antimatter pontoons fired coherent beams of black neutron antimatter at the battleglobe. Other lightspeed beams followed as the proton beamers, plasma cannons, hydrogen-fluorine metal punch lasers, excimer lasers, free electron lasers, and neutral particle beam lasers fired from dozens of hull mounts that left his starship feeling like a prickly cactus. The lightspeed weapons were followed by four 20 megaton thermonuclear torps that angled off to the four corners of their course inward, past the star’s fifth planet, a Jupiter-like analogue of green and pink cyclonic clouds. The Defense torps followed, putting out massive amounts of electronic white noise, three decoy images of Dreadnought Mata Hari similar to the decoy Remote that lay a thousand kilometers ahead of them and toward which the battleglobe had been headed, and finally a cloud of gaseous mercury to absorb any return laser fire. The cloud was embedded with nanoBit computers that would magnetically open holes for his return fire on a pattern known only to him and Mata Hari. He did not think it necessary to activate the flat Alcubierre space-time shields that would absorb any incoming weapon.

  Nine hundred milliseconds.

  Acting on impulse, Matt swiveled the fusion pulse system drive sideways to push Mata Hari off the line of its initial Translation appearance.

  A black beam of antimatter counterfire came at them two seconds after his “surprise” attack had begun, running directly along their Translation arrival point. While the mercury cloud soaked up some of the beam, its three centimeter width was far too much to be absorbed by Matt’s decoys and the mercury cloud. And now he had his answer.

  The Anarchate commander had indeed set his StratTac CPU on automatic Defense mode, with the ability to fire any weapon upon detection of what the CPU considered a threat. Matt smiled. Perhaps he would have a chance to see this commander. Before he annihilated the battleglobe.

  Two seconds, five hundred and thirty-two milliseconds, murmured his nanoBit time tracker.

  The forward holo stars were replaced by a tachyon vidimage from the original decoy Remote and from passive nanoSensors that had been seeded in the pathway of the Nova.

  “Matt!” called Eliana. “It’s wounded badly!”

  Her voice sounded slow and disjointed to his ocean-time filled mind. Mentally he smiled. For he had already perceived via PET imagery from Mata Hari what was now appearing in the front holo.

  “Yes,” he mind-imaged his reply to a speaker that would broadcast at normal human speech speed.

  In his mind, where his two AM beams struck, mini-stars blossomed.

  The Anarchate battleglobe spouted a white gout of pure matter-to-energy conversion on its southern hemisphere and at its equatorial right side limb. Red clouds of vaporized metal were pushed out by the gamma rays created by the blast. Into the three kilometer deep holes in the battleglobe there now struck neutral particle beam lasers that were unaffected by the globe’s magnetic deflection fields. Proton, excimer and HF beams struck against the thick armor of the battleglobe, digging deep into the armor, but not harming the inner habitat zone. So far. Elsewhere on the globe its adaptive optics coating deflected back much of Matt’s incoming laser fire, even as debris and gases exited from the two AM craters on its hull. The northern hemisphere still had plenty of power. It fired antimatter beams at each of Matt’s four decoy Remotes, vaporizing them before they could dodge away. The four thermonuke bomb Remotes died from multiple laser hits. The battleglobe began to tilt its northern hemisphere toward Matt and Dreadnought Mata Hari. He mentally activated a recording he had made earlier, choosing not to leave ocean-time and thereby lose his cyborg time-lag advantage.

  “Anarchate Nova battleglobe, do you surrender?”

  Five hundred milliseconds passed between the tachspeed emission and the FTL reply from the battleglobe.

  A black icon took form in the forward holosphere, bearing the dreaded Anarchate symbol of the galaxy split by a lightning bolt. A bell-like tone sounded. Concurrent with the holo and bell-tone, an alien replaced the official emblem.

  “Cease all hostilities immediately, or face annihilation by Anarchate warship Pursuer,” intoned the tachspeed voice of a brown feathered, griffin-like alien whose species Matt knew all too well. A Mican! This cross between a tiger and a raptor fixed its three eyes on Matt’s image. “You cannot evade us forever. Surrender your ship and we may allow you to survive. As a cloneslave decanter in the Flesh Markets of Alkalurops.”

  Three seconds, five hundred milliseconds, said the nanoBit.

  Matt thought quicker than he could talk and chose to PET image a message to BattleMind. Time to bring this to an end before the battleglobe recovered from the shock of his attack.

  “Commander, my name is Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux, aboard the Dreadnought-class starship Mata Hari,” his voice replied via tachlink. “As I advised your Intelligence dome AI, we are at war with the Anarchate. No longer will we obey your Four Rules, nor ignore the enslavement of planetary populations to groups like the Halicene Conglomerate.” The alien’s dirty brown wings began to lift in outrage. “We will leave a beacon beside the remains of your Nova for whatever services your crew deem proper for passing into the great beyond. Goodbye.”

  In his mind’s eye and in the forward holosphere, the Mican’s hand moved toward a touch panel, aiming to send a neutron antimatter beam toward the source point of Matt’s tachlink. But Matt had already given his PET orders well before his image began slow-talking.

  Outside, between starship Mata Hari and the battleglobe Pursuer, there appeared a grey sheet of flat Alcubierre space-time, a shield against all incoming matter and energy weapons. Thanks to BattleMind. That was followed by a shiver of the ship as its Bethe Inducer speared out at lightspeed, passing through a hole in the Alcubierre field and impacting on the battleglobe.

  For the second time in his short life, Matt saw wondrous destruction.

  The Anarchate battleglobe had begun to shimmer with its own Bethe Inducer start-up field, but now, bathed in the orange glow of the Bethe beam, it began shrinking. Wreckage flowed back to the battleglobe as the beam induced an implosion similar to that which formed a black hole. Except in this case, instead of causing a star to go nova, Matt had chosen the beam setting that would reduce the Anarchate ship and its occupants to a few grains of collapsed neutron star matter. Sighing mentally, he imaged an order to emit a locator beacon for eventual discovery by a follow-on Anarchate battleglobe.

  Four seconds, ninety milliseconds.

  Leaving ocean-time felt like . . . hitting the ground at a hundred miles an hour. His body felt wasted. His mind felt overstimulated. And his eyes, sweeping over to the sober, spare, sculptured profile of Eliana, felt wet.

  “My love, we are done here. Do you mind if we Translate to Zeta Serpentis? I have a chore to complete there and a lesson to share with BattleMind.”

  Eliana nodded slowly, her black eyebrows crinkling with concern. “Of course Matthew. My love. I support you. Always.”

  Support him she had, ever since the end of the battle in Halcyon system when she had broken the isolation tube that held his slow virus-infected body to grip his hand and declare she loved him. Openly declared love was something he’d experienced only once before.

  Eliana knew the story of his lost love, Helen Sayinga Trinh. A baccarat card dealer who was bond-owned by a casino dome on the airless resort planet Omega, a Mercury analogue that orbited close to the F3V star Zeta Serpentis. Her Owners had pursued him and her when they had left without buying out her contract. They had fled in a decrepit freighter, aiming for a Sixth Wave colony planet that lay in Perseus Arm. They had never made that refuge. Resource pirates had attacked the freighter with KKPs, killing her and leaving him to float in stasis in a lifepod. Until he had been found by starship Mata Hari, and given the chance to do something good for people victimized by the Anarchate. He had become a cyborg-human mix, and had taken jobs as a Vigilante for hire. He’d even used the words of the ancient vidpic hero Paladin—“Have starship, will travel.”

  He h
ad traveled far beyond ancient Earth. Now, in pursuit of his battle against the soul-destroying culture of the Anarchate, he would travel across home galaxy and eventually to the Small Magellanic Cloud. And he would leave behind . . . painful lessons for the Anarchate and a name that people without hope might pass on, in whispers to their children. So he hoped, deep in his mind, before he passed out from Translation and Interface overload.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In his dreams, Matt recalled the life he had chosen, that of a Vigilante who had sworn to his lost love Helen that he would use his abilities to help people in need. People all too often ignored by the Anarchate and the industrial Conglomerates that ruled whole star clusters. Unless the world held something they wanted, like mineral resources that the Halicene Conglomerate had schemed to extract from planet Halcyon, even when it meant poisoning the biosphere and killing two intelligent peoples.

  He had blocked that effort, that wrongness. But in a galaxy of four hundred billion stars and at least 17 billion Earth-like planets, evil had plenty of places to grow when there was no law, no justice and no galactic ruler except for the Anarchate, which enforced star-to-star anarchy because it was profitable.

  And to enforce its Four Rules. Number One said no planet interferes with the internal affairs of another planet. Number Two said all planets obey Anarchate orders. Number Three said every planet pays taxes to the Anarchate—or suffers interstellar quarantine. And Number Four said no one challenges an Anarchate Nova-class battleglobe--on pain of total destruction.

  Well, he had fulfilled his promise to Helen by rescuing Halcyon, and by destroying two Anarchate battleglobes. He and starship Mata Hari, which was also his AI partner Mata Hari, had done that together.

  It was a life whose strangeness still amazed him. A life where he could be close to something, and yet not be affected by closeness. A life where he could insulate himself from caring, from attachment. From the circumstance of watching as—inevitably—anything he cared for was eventually destroyed, damaged, or taken from him. It was a surcease from caring, with challenging work.