“Translating!” he called over mindlink to his pilot allies.
Greyness surrounded his ship. In the brief portion of a second that they spent in Alcubierre space-time, Matt gave thanks that his Mom and sister had remained quiet in their accel-couches behind him. The time he’d spend in picnics with them, in showing them his aquarium of puffer fish and Navaho-style woven hangings, and in learning more about their years in labor slavery, had bonded the three of them even closer. He finally felt like he had recovered his long-lost family. That memory pain had eased greatly.
Two seconds, 13 milliseconds, 43 nanoseconds, 67 picoseconds and 15 femtoseconds, said his cyberclock.
“Matthew, we are exiting now and moving from south ecliptic to north ecliptic,” Mata Hari said as her mind persona became that of Lady of the Sword, her laser tipped sword pointed forward and at an angle where they expected the enemy fleet to be.
“Everyone, eject tachRemotes, holo decoys of your ship, and sensorBeads once we emerge,” he said even as BattleMind joined them, his eagerness to use his Sun Glow weapon against a target very obvious. “And during the ten femtoseconds between our emergence and coverage by our wraparound shields, fire a first antimatter barrage at that cluster of battleglobes! Your AI can do this for you faster than you can think it!”
Greyness disappeared. Normal light and radiation emissions filled Matt’s multi-spectral vision. His ship skin felt the AM cannons from both his left and right wings. The Alcubierre shields slid over all parts of his ship, then the tachRemotes they’d ejected sent to him FTL images of what lay ahead of them.
“Firing antimatter beams!” cried BattleMind with a mental snarl so loud it felt like Matt’s neurons were being shaken like a bunch of dice.
“What the hell are they doing bunched together like that!” cried George.
“Idiots,” grunted Rafael as his ship moved into the wheel rotation around Matt’s central ship that was their standard deployment.
“Not idiots!” cried Suzanne in their minds. “They are deploying their—”
“No!” cried Matt as his ship vision saw globes of Alcubierre space-time appear just outside the giant globe shape of each battleglobe. The Alcubierre globes measured twice the width of each battleglobe. The forty-eight antimatter beams fired in their first barrage disappeared into the greyness of Elsewhere-Elsewhen. “They’ve got something like our own shields!” he said to everyone in mind communion. “Just not wraparound,”
“Option!” called Toktaleen. “If two of us Translate to the far side of this fleet formation we may be able to sneak some antimatter beams into the unshielded interior of this globe arrangement!”
Matt thought computer fast even as Mata Hari and BattleMind raced through ship systems seeking an offense option. “No! We stay together. But we each use our Sun Glow weapon! Two Sun Globe beams per battleglobe! Fire on the formation and see if we can turn them into stellar plasma!”
Running Leader felt intense shock as sixteen white spears of coherent neutrinos shot out from eight invisible sources just a hundred thousand nipads away! In less than a nito the white spears hit eight of his 32 battleglobes and overloaded the new Alcubierre Bubble shields which his scientists at the Orion Nebula shipyard had created for him. Eight ships became white orbs of stellar plasma.
He cursed! He thought anger. He thought Herd Defense. Yes! Tighten the herd closer together so the oncoming antimatter beams could not hit the interior hemisphere of a ship in globe formation. Plus a random jinking of his remaining 24 battleglobes should help them avoid future attacks from this neutrino beam or from the mysterious black hole beam that shrunk planets down to tiny nodules. His fleet had neither of those weapons. But they had discovered five ways of bypassing or collapsing the Alcubierre shields of these T’Chak ships.
“Malel! Chief Lark! Launch everything we dispersed in that space at the vector line of the Human’s fleet!” he croaked in guttural Belizel even as his neurolink to the antimatter domes of Defiant II told his crews to fire multiple barrages of antimatter at the predicted transit line of the enemy fleet. Perhaps one of the twelve beams his ship could emit per barrage would strike a T’Chak ship with its defense shield down!
“Launching!” cried Chief Lark.
“Maneuvering as a fleet unit,” cried Yanakutt at NavCore.
“Firing antimatter beams,” hooted the Hootnai quadruped Strong Stalker.
“Ejecting Black Hole globes at the vector path,” muttered Chief Lark right after activating the Remotes and autonomous weapons clusters they had dispersed on the starward side of planet Tasty Lunch, in anticipation of the sideways flyby that Running Leader had warned about.
Croaking with hormonal surges of Herd Defense pheromones and Unity Instinct, Running Leader thought as fast as he could, his mind pulses translated by his ship’s AI into group action.
Matt’s compartmentalized mind swirled with motion vectors, heat glows as stealthed Thermonuke sleds and Assault Asteroids went to full power, gravity pulses as dozens of small black holes were ejected toward their future vector path, and x-ray Picket Globes became thermonuclear fusion globes as they shot coherent x-rays at the eight ships of Hexagon Prime fleet. The Picket Globes also produced an EMP effect that screwed with his ship sensors, although the tachRemotes they’d ejected earlier had spread into a fan that allowed them to ‘see’ beyond any local explosion. The tachRemotes showed the Dolmat’s fleet drawing closer together and jinking sideways, upward and into erratic spirals as a coherent group.
Two seconds, 113 milliseconds, 413 nanoseconds, 667 picoseconds and 93 femtoseconds, said his cyberclock.
Damn! This new Anarchate fleet captain had five weapons that could kill or harm his ships even with the wraparound shields, and its fleet was replicating the ‘move off the vector line’ tactic which his fleet had long used to avoid being where an expert Fire Control CPU predicted they would be. Time to act!
But the Dolmat attack hit them just as he thought the word.
“Two shields lost!” cried Ben from Flowering as six Thermonuke sleds hit his ship, his pain and fear carrying clearly into their mind communion.
“Matt! Go sideways now!” cried Suzanne in his mind as she sent him the mind image of an incoming Assault Asteroid that had jumped into Alcubierre Drive and was aiming to materialize within his Alcubierre defense fields.
“Ouch!” yelled George as a Supply Tube filled with antimatter hit his spine shield and overloaded it, the surge of ionization and EM energies causing the shield node to melt and two dozen directed energy domes on the purple spine of his dragon ship became lightning emitters as they overloaded. Three coherent x-ray beams struck the midbody of George’s ship just before the wraparound shield covered the exposed ship hull. “Damn that hurt!”
“George!” cried Suzanne. “I’m coming!”
“I’m closer,” Matt sent to Suzanne. He used his Repulsor to move sideways even as George’s AI extended the side shield to cover the briefly exposed spine of ship Inevitable.
“Fire more Sun Glow beams at them!” Matt said as several of his Alcubierre shields hummed to impacts from incoming antimatter beams, proton and carbon dioxide beams and x-ray lasers.
“I’m hit!” cried Eliana as her ship Altuna staggered under the impact of three small black holes that took out half of her six defense shields.
Dozens more black holes neared them in a fan array that guaranteed some would hit.
“Stepwise Translation now!” Matt cried into mindlink, giving each pilot the exact coordinates that would land their shaky Hub-and-Wheel formation closer to the planet and a little further away from the enemy fleet.
Greyness covered his eyes. Mata Hari’s persona moved lightning fast to recharge the antimatter reservoirs for future cannon barrages even as BattleMind adjusted the angle of his Sun Glow weapon so it would be pointed at where the T’Chak AI expected the Dolmat’s fleet to be. Or might be, considering how the herbivore had the advantage of FTL perception of Matt’s fleet while they h
ad a mix of FTL and real-time light perception.
Even as BattleMind fired the Sun Glow spear at the jinking enemy fleet and Mata Hari fired two of their wing antimatter cannons at the center of Sharp Claw city, destroying the five Flesh Markets in the Hootnai city, he realized something.
Only seven ships had exited from Stepwise Translation.
Eliana had thought the order to enter Alcubierre space-time just as a single antimatter beam struck the exposed rear of her ship Altuna. Her mindlink to her ship, the link that let her feel the ship as if it were a dress she wore and shoes she walked in, that link filled her mind with a blazing fire pain that consumed many compartments of her ship mind.
“Altuna! Save us!”
Her Interlock Pit inertial field kept her safe as the AM beam melted the magfield confinement of four of her ship’s fusion power plants, including the Alcubierre Star Drive initiator module. Multiple thermonuclear blasts at the rear of her ship propelled her and it forward and into a tumbling end-over-nose rotation. The rotation selectively exposed the jagged end of her starship, the air escaping before pressure hatches closed and power rerouted to other broadcast power emitters. Then pointed it away from the nearing Anarchate fleet of 20 surviving battleglobes. Four had been lost to the second barrage of Sun Glow attacks. But those 20 acted in unison and with deadly effect.
“Extending shields to cover both wings,” said the male T’Chak dragon, its mind flow hitting her like a tree falling on a mouse. “Stern remains exposed. Remaining eight fusion plants are stable. Options?”
“Fire plasma clouds from your snout ejector!” she cried, using PET thought-imaging to let the AI see how the 200 meter wide purple plasma balls would intercept all solid Remotes, sensors and KKVs launched against them. “Stop tumbling with Repulsor power! For our exposed nose, combine nose pressor beams into a pointed cone! The pressor fields will push aside the incoming black holes!”
“Acting,” said her AI co-pilot. “However, ship systems are unstable. Maintenance of shields is uncertain. Human ally, you should enter your combat suit and fly to the shuttle Halcyon in our cargohold. In case this ship becomes stellar plasma.”
“No!” she cried to the gruff dragon. “I won’t leave you! But I will enter my suit. We could lose atmo pressure.”
With that thought Eliana stayed in ocean-time, reaching out to tell Matt what had happened to her ship, even as her suit walked over to stand beside the pit. It bent forward, opening up the back entryway. “Shall this CPU bring you inside with a tractor beam?”
Eliana felt Matt’s mind receive her thought-image summary of what had happened to her ship. Good. She could be out of joint battle mode for a half second. “Take me into you, Tactical CPU.”
The gentle touch of her suit’s tractor beam lifted her up. Her fiber optic cable link to Altuna and the battle snapped loose. Her perception of the battle slowed to normal time input by way of laser impacts on her bare skin. She felt the fire at her feet still raging. But it seemed as if Altuna had things under control.
That thought co-occurred with her ship being hit a second time with an antimatter beam that hit the molten stardrive section and bit deep into ship Altuna. Flame filled her mind. And as the suit’s neurolink cable socketed into her neck, she heard the scream of a T’Chak dragon, an AI whose body had taken a fatal blow.
“Matt!” she cried over the tachlink module. “Goodbye!”
Running Leader’s Herd Instinct trembled to the loss of four more herd mates as a second barrage of white neutrino beams lanced through the Alcubierre Bubble shields and into the matter of four battleglobes, collapsing them into raging balls of stellar plasma. Only the FTL image of a T’Chak ship that suddenly showed part of its hull thanks to black hole impacts on three of its shields gave him some hope the herd might survive.
“Target’s drive section destroyed!” screeched Chief Lark as an antimatter beam fired by a herd mate struck at the exposed tail of the T’Chak warship, vaporizing a half-nipad of its length. Thermonuclear explosions blossomed out, forcing the T’Chak ship into a forward tumble that exposed the rear, then the unshielded nose to incoming fire.
“Fire again!” Running Leader cried to the rest of his fleet over their joint tachlink communications.
“Enemy fleet has jumped to a new position!” cried Yanakutt at NavCore. “Gravity wave pulses show seven emergences closer to the planet!”
“Move the fleet toward the planet on deut-li drive!” Running Leader ordered, not wishing to lose their FTL vision of the wounded enemy.
Matt shuddered at the pain felt by Eliana and her ship as her mindlink with the fleet brought to them the loss of her drive section and a third of her ship’s fusion reactors. Dozens of his mind compartments filled with hundreds of other inputs.
“Shooting KKVs at incoming track of enemy fleet!” reported Toktaleen with a calmness to his clicks that did not match the mental emotion felt by the giant ant. “They will destroy any incoming Thermonuke sleds!”
“Two battleglobes hit by my AM cannons!” yelled George as his ruddy face showed sweaty concentration. “They’ve swung their Alcubierre Bubbles toward us!”
“Comsats, Picket Globes and KKVs destroyed!” said the voices of Rafael, Ben, Sarah and Suzanne as Matt perceived pink proton beams lashing out from their ships to vaporize the mobile remotes that the Dolmat had prepositioned in orbit above the planet.
“Matt!” cried Eliana. “Goodbye!”
Short nanoseconds carried the mind imagery of her ship Altuna being blown apart by an antimatter beam that traveled up the ship’s central axis, destroying its remaining eight fusion reactors, antimatter reservoirs and crumpling into nothing the thread of the Spine hallway that ran the length of every T’Chak ship. A massive sense of pain came from his lifemate, then her thoughts vanished.
“Eliana!” he screamed, feeling fear for the first time in many years. “Live!”
Milliseconds passed as his fellow pilots reacted to the loss of Eliana with emotions of shock, horror, sadness and disbelief. Then Suzanne turned her teary red eyes to him.
“She’s alive! Matt, she’s alive! Her mind is there but she was knocked out by the final blasts as the ship blew up. She’s in her combat suit and its Tactical CPU is pushing her away from the blast zone. A . . . a second object, a purple globe, is paralleling her escape vector,” Suzanne said, her sense of hope and relief matching his. “It’s . . . yes! It’s the mind of Altuna the AI! Like when BattleMind joined us at the T’Chak homeworld visit! The two of them survived. But they have only pressor beams to keep away the sensorBeads, nanoShells and KKVs that may come after them!”
Matt’s mind shivered with relief. And before he could make a decision, Sarah did it for him.
“Fleet! We Translate back and surround Eliana and Altuna with our Wheel formation!”
Matt saw his six fellows receding from mind communion. “Go! But I’m heading for the Dolmat’s fleet!”
Three seconds, 54 milliseconds, 977 nanoseconds, 234 picoseconds and 789 femtoseconds, said his cyberclock.
Greyness filled Matt’s computer fast mind as anger, shame, pity, fear and obsession filled his mind all at the same time. That would not do. With a mental yank to his inner self, Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux went stone cold sober in his planning for the next half second of interstellar combat. There was at least one weapon he had not yet used. And it would have a deadly impact on the Anarchate fleet.
Running Leader felt the emotion of joy mixed with disbelief as the wounded T’Chak Dreadnought blew itself into a cloud of thermonuclear plasma. His fellow ship captains felt the same excitement, along with relief that the enemy fleet had moved away from their remaining battlemates.
Yanakutt the elder fluttered its antennae. “Sector Captain, my sensors report six gravity wave pulses next to the site of the T’Chak ship explosion! Their fleet appears to have reversed course away from the planet.”
Running Leader had sensed the same gravity wave pulses over his ship neurolin
k. Even as the antimatter combat crews fired at the former site of the enemy’s emergence into normal space-time, as multiple Supply Tubes and Assault Asteroids flung themselves at those coordinates by way of short-range Translation jumps, the relocation of the enemy back to where one of its number had died puzzled him. The puzzlement lasted only long enough for his mind to realize the seventh surviving enemy ship had not joined the other six ships.
“Jump into Translation!” he cried over neurolink to his herd battlemates. “Disperse the herd!”
Matt emerged from Translation less than fifty thousand kilometers from the twenty remaining battleglobes as they drove toward his fleet’s former position on simple deut-li fusion pulse drive.
“Leave our shields down!” he yelled to Mata Hari. “I want them all to see a fire-breathing dragon coming down their throats!”
With a thought Matt triggered the Stasis Beam gifted to his ship by his Bogean allies. The beam passed through any Alcubierre shield, any EMF shield, any solid matter. Its effect was to put the crew of any starship into hibernation stasis. Every organic mind on board the target starship lost any link with the battleglobe’s Command Core AI. Which left that AI with just one option.
Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) Page 23