Eliana disappeared. Only to be replaced by the dragon image of Lorelei. “My co-pilot, how does fleshly life create . . . small versions of themselves? Babies I believe is the term.”
Damn! Had Lorelei been spying on hers and George’s last session of love-sharing? She hoped not. While being in continuous mindlink with eight humans and ten AIs made it hard to separate their private lives from their ship lives, everyone in mindlink had agreed to do so. Kind of a mental ‘clothing’ that they all applied to personal time spent outside of their Battle Council.
“Lorelei, add that to your questions for Mata Hari!” She sniffed, trying to push away her distinct and lovely memory of loving George of the wide shoulders, tight abdomen, strong buttocks, black curly hair and—“Just ask her!”
Lorelei’s shape changed to her blue cloud persona. “I will inquire. After all, she and her Gatekeeper partner have done much research in this area.”
Suzanne paid no attention to her AI’s personal questions and comments. They had a battle coming up and Matt might need fleet support. They all must be ready to Translate into the system within milliseconds!
Matt emerged from the Dark Energy stardrive in ocean-time mode, his thoughts winging through the two kilometers of ship Mata Hari, touching base with Mata Hari herself, with a wave at BattleMind as the giant dragon focused its attention on the Sun Glow and Graviton weapons. BattleMind loved destruction at the stupendous level. Even though Matt had no plan to use those weapons, well, the unexpected had a habit of changing the best thought-out plans of both people and AIs.
Their arrival in normal space-time on the opposite side of the system from the gas giant allowed Matt a seven femtosecond view of normal space-time. Then the ship’s Alcubierre shields enveloped all six sides of the ship and they disappeared from perception by anyone outside their shields. Only the brief occultation of a distant star as they passed between the star and a viewer looking their way would alert anyone to the fact that some ship with perfect stealth had arrived.
The surprise happened.
“There’s a Corvette—”
“Corvette ship lying in Nova Blast position!” said Mata Hari in his mind.
“Damn!” He realized that the Anarchate planned to sacrifice its remaining two battleglobes and the small Courier in an effort to catch his fleet with the lightspeed expansion of the star’s corona in a nova blast that could catch them in place, before they could Translate out. Like they had done during the Dumbbell Nebula battle when they’d taken out an Anarchate Admin Center.
“Matthew,” called Mata Hari in tach mindlink. “Does the Dolmat ship captain know about this Nova Blast effort? We know one of the battleglobes is his ship, based on its spectrogram and emissions arc.”
Did he? Did the Dolmat herbivore who had come up with two new Offense weapons and the Alcubierre Bubble Defense intend to sacrifice himself and his other ships so the Anarchate could decimate Matt and his fleet? There was one way to find out. Or rather two ways.
“Suzanne! Eliana! Look at what I’m seeing on the far side of this star! Someone is planning a Nova Blast against us as soon as we Translate into the system,” he said, sending his mind-image to all the pilots of Hexagon Prime. “Can you two check the . . . the mind feel of this Dolmat? See if his mind reflects a suicidal mood?”
Suzanne’s blond smile and Eliana’s jade green glow both sent him mindpulses of agreement. In a few hundred milliseconds he perceived their mindtouch.
Eliana was first like always. “No sense of—”
“Suicidal feelings or thoughts,” finished Suzanne.
The mind-sisters grinned at each other, then turned serious. “It seems this Dolmat captain was sent here to draw you into a trap that contained layers of which he was unaware,” they both mindspoke in unison.
Two hundred sixty-seven milliseconds, 47 nanoseconds, 23 picoseconds and 11 femtoseconds, echoed the cyberclock in his mind.
Matt felt the attention of the other pilots and AIs in their mind communion. “Everyone, I’m glad I followed our advice to Immovable about always checking the far side of the star that hosts an Anarchate base!” He sent a mindpulse of reassurance to everyone. “My ship and I will continue with our mission. We’ll see what can be done on site and in stealth. It’s likely I will call all of you to Translate into the system. Later!”
# # #
Running Leader was getting frustrated with counting the nitas since the arrival of the seven gravity wave pulses. Was the Human trying to draw him out to battle on the system’s outer edge? Doing that would damage the pincer-on-pincer battle plan that Sytoon had shared with him.
“Crew, stay alert to anything unexpected!” he croaked in standard Belizel. “Yanakutt, call Dokeel am-thak over on the Courier!”
The black and white stripes of the Hootnai quadruped appeared in holo before Running Leader’s Command Bench. The elongated head and single eye of the Intel Base spy fixed on him. “Sector Captain, you have orders for attacking the gravity wave sources?”
“Not yet,” he croaked. “Where is the Human female clone? Is she awake? Able to talk?”
The long brown eyelashes of the Hootnai lifted slowly. “She is isolated within her rest cubicle. And yes and yes to your questions secondary. Why?”
“Bring her out and put her before your tachnet visualizer. Perhaps the real-time image of her will draw a response from our target!”
The Hootnai gestured with a chest tendril. “As you wish. I have ordered a Security bot to escort her to the Bridge. We remain on Combat Alert.”
“As you should!” he croaked. Running Leader looked to his Spelidon crewman. “Chef Lark! Any sign from ship sensors of target acquisition?”
“None,” wheezed the black-furred biped. “I am in neurolink with ship Dedicated’s Tactical officer and we are both randomizing our sensor sweeps. Any detection will draw an instant reply!”
Running Leader told himself to be patient. A hard thing for a person used to being always on the move, always mobile as part of the herd commune. He’d found a career in the Anarchate navy by seeing duty on the Bridge as equal to work as a herd Scout, a person obliged to run back to the herd with news of predators. Unfortunately, unseen predators did not offer the herd an option for a stampede or a retreat.
# # #
Matt’s ship arrived just above the three ship cluster of the Dolmat ship, the second battleglobe and the Courier that contained his sister’s clone. Within seven femtoseconds his Alcubierre shields covered the Mata Hari completely. Stretching out his multi-spectral perception, Matt perceived a rainstorm of multi-colored particles ranging from neutrino white to gamma ray blue to the purple of ultraviolet. Heat glows showed on the three ships, concentrated at the engines and weapons, with scattered red dots that documented a thousand or so crew persons aboard the three ships. Active sensor scans filled the space around them. Not far away floated x-ray Picket Globes, Thermonuke sleds, a few Assault Asteroids ready to power up and try to materialize within his Alcubierre shields, and hundreds of energyRemotes that sought the energy signatures of intruding Remotes. Like the ones infiltrated by George and now by his ship.
“Mata Hari, are your limpet complinks away?”
“Yes,” she said in mindtalk.
Matt gave her a mindpulse of appreciation. “How soon before your complink attaches to the Dolmat battleglobe?”
His AI glowed in his mind in the Lady of the Sword persona, one hand pointing her laser sword toward the three ship cluster, while her dark eyes scanned the space within which they floated. “Attaching now. At the north polar antimatter embrasure. It contains combat control nodes that penetrate the 300 meters of carbon-carbon ablative armor.” The AI who had come to love him paused, gave a sharp nod. “We’re into the ship’s primary mind Core. My complink is working to circumvent the several layers of encryption and changing comlink frequencies. Nothing we haven’t seen before, in the debris of other battleglobes.” She looked up at Matt, her expression hawk-like. “Done! The shi
p’s Core mind is under our control. And as you suspected, there is a new algorithm that circumvents the automatic ‘destroy yourself’ order of the Anarchate’s Combat Command. It is safe to apply stasis to this ship and its crew.”
Four hundred thirty-one milliseconds, 132 nanoseconds, 11 picoseconds and 12 femtoseconds, said his cyberclock.
Matt gave a dual PET thought-image to Mata Hari and ship systems. “Fire two antimatter beams on the other battleglobe, aiming for its north polar AM battery,” he said in mindlink. “At the same moment sweep the Dolmat battleglobe with the Stasis Beam!”
Focusing his mind on the other six ships of the Hexagon Prime, he gave a third command. “Translate into this system and materialize in the open space between the gas giant and the inner asteroid belt. There are no Picket Globes or other offensive Remotes in that area. It’s a third of an orbit ahead of where I am located. Stay for just two seconds, then Translate back out to where you are now!” he said, sending a mindimage of his location and its deadly Remotes. “ I will join you with the Dolmat battleglobe in tow.”
Matt focused on the nearby Courier that was even now transmitting a tachnet broadcast of his clone sister.
“Matthew, I miss you,” said the red-headed young woman who perfectly matched his memory of his sister from the day before he’d left the farmstead and taken a skimmer south to Elios Port. Her familiar voice echoed through fifteen years of memory pain. “Please come and visit me? I will share my cloneday birth celebration with you!”
“Fire a three-megaton KKV at the Courier,” he ordered Mata Hari.
She sent him a mindpulse of empathy and sympathy even as she fired the KKV through their Alcubierre shield. At planetary escape velocity, the KKV would cross the few kilometers from his ship to the Courier nearly as fast as normal thought.
Mentally he sought a hideaway for his grief, even as another segment of his mind told Mata Hari to tell the Dolmat battleglobe to enter Translation and follow them to the rendezvous three light years out.
Running Leader felt the Combat alarm echo through the Defiant II. Mental and acoustic clanging sufficient to draw in the dead from the Spectral Side filled his mind and his ears. Ahead on the Bridge the master holo showed the space above them. An occultation of a few stars glowed in purple ultraviolet as Chief Lark’s black whiskers spread wide in the body sign of Fearful Surprise.
“Ship above us!” shrieked the Spelidon as his scaly tail thumped the ship’s metal floor. “Just a few nipads away! Now in Alcubierre stealth mode. Cannot fire our black holes at it! Wrong angle. No response from our polar AM embrasure. Maybe the Dedicated can—”
A sense of lassitude filled his body and his mind. He knew it as the feel of stasis that he and other students at the naval academy had been forced to endure. So they could understand the disorientation of long-haul colony ships outbound for a distant world. Sometimes they called the Anarchate for help. Sometimes they—
Frozen thoughts followed him into a single image dream time.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Matt stood near the Interlock Pit, wearing his black and white yukata robe, and holding hands with Eliana, who wore a Polynesian lava-lava skirt with chest wrap. To his left stood Mata Hari in Spy persona, with the giant black-winged form of BattleMind filling up that portion of the Bridge. To his right, sitting on the arms of their accel-couches, were his sister Charlotte, whose long red ponytail covered her neck socket. Beyond Charlotte stood his nervous mother Kristen, her hazel eyes fixed on the unconscious alien who lay on a long gravpad next to the purple metal globe which housed the mind of Mata Hari. Gatekeeper, the AI partner of Mata Hari, stood beside the purple globe, his holo image that of a Greek farmer with a two day stubble and mud spattered on his brown coveralls. The holo of Mata Hari looked Matt’s way.
“Matthew, shall I bring this Dolmat out of stasis?” she said, gesturing to the six-legged heavyworlder who rested belly-down on a gravpad. Its two eyes were closed, its chest armhands crossed under its blocky head, and its spike-tail unmoving. “He will feel discomfort since it is earlier than the normal six hours for natural awareness to return.”
“Yes. And put the image of the star going nova up on the front holo, once the Dolmat shows mental coordination.”
“Countering stasis with a nanoDoc injection,” Mata Hari said as a tiny ornithopter applied an air pressure injection against the tough hide of the Alien herbivore. “He is restrained under a strong inertial field.”
Running Leader’s dream mind became active. At which point part of his mind told him he was coming out of stasis. The emergence felt stiffer than at the academy training session. Slowly he opened his eyes, adjusted vision to the yellow light that was dominant, and wondered why he was surrounded by a crowd of unstable bipeds. A new type of nightmare?
“My crew?” he croaked as recent memory returned. “Are they alive? Where are—”
“Your crew is safe in stasis,” said the tall biped with the facial features that matched the Human with the name sigil Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux. “Your ship is intact, lying a few hundred nipads from my fleet. We are three light cycles out from the blue-white star that you came to three days earlier.” The Human paused, then used its left side armhand to gesture toward a holosphere that showed a blue-white star exploding into a nova. “You and your ships were part of a trap to capture me. Your Intel Base High Commander failed to tell you that the Council of Sixteen chose to sacrifice you and your ships by applying your Nova Blast tactic to kill all of us. Upon detection of our gravity wave pulses arriving in system.”
Running Leader blinked, felt his body restrained by an inertial field, moved his vision to ultraviolet and saw dozens of emissions in that range that filled the Bridge of the Human’s starship, then noticed the shape of a T’Chak avian reptile standing twice his length. Its red eyes, long snout, curving black wings, glowing purple spine arcs, long spike-tail and chest armhands crossed over yellow scales matched the shape of T’Chak ships that he had seen in his battles against this Human. A shimmer to the edge of the T’Chak reptile, and the white-clothed Human female standing beside the reptile told him they were holograms, rather than solid beings. Wishing his spike-tail was mobile so he could slam the floor with his feelings of frustration, he spoke.
“So you say, Human Dragoneaux.” He moved his head slowly, appreciating that at least his head and his armhands were allowed normal movement within the inertial field. “How did our battle end?”
The Dragoneaux biped looked aside at a line of female Humans, then showed its teeth. The Compendium of Species said that Human exposure of masticating bones was not a threat of eating the person in conversation, but a sign of amusement. Strange species that used standard predator expressions as a sign of amusement.
“You lost. We won. No damage to our fleet.” The Human gestured again at the three dee holo of the exploding star. “In the brief moments when I and my ship were present above your three ships, I used our Stasis Beam to put into stasis all lifeforms within your ship, fired two antimatter beams at the other battleglobe, and fired a thermonuke KKV at the Courier ship.” The Human paused, looked aside at a female adorned with a cranial infestation of red curly fur, then focused its two brown oculars back on him. “The Courier disintegrated. The battleglobe Dedicated was seriously damaged, and after the arrival of your ship Defiant II and my ship at this spot, we watched this over tachRemotes.”
Running Leader observed as the blue-white corona of the local star sped outward at the speed of light. It quickly enveloped the rocky planet in orbit one, then shortly engulfed the wide asteroid belt in the second orbital, and finally ate the gas giant. And battleglobe Dedicated. He did not have the artistic feeling so he could not appreciate the colors of vast streams of atmospheric gas fleeing away from the large planet before it was engulfed by the star’s corona. He fixed both eyes on the Human.
“Interesting imagery. Why should I believe it? And why should I assume it reflects recent events?”
“Y
ou crazy fat land lizard you—”
“Stop, Charlotte!” said the Dragoneaux biped to the red-curled Human female that he recognized as the male’s sibling, or sister as the Humans applied the term. Beside the outspoken red-hair stood another Human female, slightly less tall than the talking female. The shorter female’s head was also infested with red curls, but a few streaks of grey lent a pleasant tone to the overall sickness of pink or red skin. Compared to his own deep brown armor skin, these Human bipeds looked distinctly . . . diseased. However, his memory from the Compendium data file said variable colors for the surface tegument of this species was normal. He turned his head to the rear as his sensitive ears detected the motion of air. Another Human who wore decent brown colors stood behind his gravpad. The slight flicker of the image edge said this Human was also a hologram. He looked to the Dragoneaux biped.
“An interesting mix of bipedal and reptilian holograms, along with sickly appearing Human females,” he said to Dragoneaux. “Is their appearance the result of living too long within this alien ship?”
The Human female standing beside Dragoneaux whose skin was a pale white while her cranium hosted an infestation of long black threads, barked loudly. His Compendium memory said the bark was ‘laughter.’ Interesting how, after the recent battle for the defeat and capture of the renegade Human, this female felt like his words were entertainment.
“Sector Captain Running Leader, the skin appearances of the humans standing within our view are normal to our species,” said the female, letting go of her attachment to the Dragoneaux biped’s right armhand. “The holograms your enhanced vision has detected are images of three AIs that are aboard this Dreadnought-class warship. A fourth AI, name of Altuna, goes with my T’Chak ship.” The Human female paused, perhaps due to thirst as its speech organ licked its thin lips. “That ship is the one you destroyed in the battle at CC4213, in globular cluster NGC 6397.”
Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) Page 29