Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) (22 page)

Metzenbaum eyed Charlotte with a look like the ones she recalled her father Benoit giving her when she failed to complete her vidcast homework. Then the man
leaned forward again, in imitation of the Hootnai ‘paying attention’ body posture. “Agreed. That amount is now deposited. Thank you for your services to Thuringia. I hope your departure from our world will be swift.”

Grindalamun
’s horse-mouth smiled. Or, Charlotte thought it was a smile. “This is a pleasant world. For those who choose to grub in the dirt like herbivores. May you escape the day predators and survive to another sunrise.”

“Thank you,” said Metzenbaum as he straightened up.

The Hootnai turned its cyclopean eye to Charlotte. “ For a bipedal omnivore, you did provide some entertainment. May your Hunt be productive.” It turned away and headed for the landing field and its shuttle
Savage
. Charlotte turned back to face Governor Metzenbaum. Whose grey eyes fixed intently on her.

“No last name. Give me the names of your mother and father.”

“Kristen and Benoit,” she said, trying for a zebra-striped smile. “My mom is still alive and so is—”

“Don’t say your sibling’s name!” Metzenbaum said harshly. “I know it already. From galactic tachnet reports on his
spatial adventures.” The man showed a distant look, then focused back on her. “I’ve already had one Anarchate interrogation about our losses from fifteen years ago. I am not eager to repeat that social encounter. And the worries that came with it.” The man lifted his datapad and tapped it several times. “To know your mother is still alive is, however, new to me. I am happy to hear it. We had thought all 47 captives were dead.”

“Most were,” Charlotte said, her mind recalling the horrors of an unlighted cargohold where they had eaten
just twice and drunk once on a weeklong trip to the Flesh Markets of Alkalurops. “We gave our blood to my three sisters but they died anyway. Too young to—”

“Enough,” said Metzenbaum with a softness to his deep voice that surprised her. “When we can talk in private, versus over comlink, I look forward to hearing your news. And the news of your other family members. Now, go out the city side of the arrival hall and take the hoverjet that I’ve rented. It awaits you. Your image is already encoded to its Core. Step inside and it will bring you out to my farm. My wife and I look forward to seeing you, young survivor.”

Charlotte felt close to tears. She gasped. She was home! At last, she was back where she’d grown up. Back on the world where some of her farm neighbors had been kidnapped along with her family. Back on a world with dry winds, a harsh winter, but a beautifully green spring and summer. And even though it was now fall, with winter to come, she knew a lot about surviving hard times and frigid temperatures. Both Alien and planetary.

Matt looked at the tachlink message from Thuringia Governor Metzenbaum. It had come to him over the
small tachRemote that his buddy George had delivered to the system, just after the Intel Base battle. While the rest of the fleet had headed for Morrigan and a well deserved rest and recreation, George had taken a side trip to Pi-3 Orion to stop briefly at the system’s heliopause. His ship
Inevitable
had ejected the tachRemote toward the planet, where it arrived a week later. Programmed codes had moved the device into a geosync orbit over Elios Port, a position occupied by other orbital comsats. Its presence there would not be noticed by the Anarchate base on Thuringia’s moon, or by people arriving at the Commerce Station that orbited much closer to Thuringia. The device had contacted Metzenbaum recently with the info on raid survivors they had recovered during the slaver base attack. Now, the governor was contacting him.

“Mom, come over here. You need to see this.”

His mother Kristen looked over from where she stood at the Food Alcove in
Mata Hari’s
Communal Hall. She, Eliana and Matt had decided to share a meal together before taking evening rest. She took her food from the Alcove heater and brought it over to the flexfloor table that hosted them. Eliana left the Reader Alcove where she had been researching the history of Thuringia and came to the table, summoned by Matt’s mental call.

Krist
en sat down, laid her plate of Chinese rice and grilled chicken strips on the table and looked over at the AllCall datapad Matt held in his hands. “Something interesting there?

Eliana, still wearing her green
cheongsam
dress, sat and leaned forward. “Matthew, what is your nice surprise?”

“This. Take a look at this holo,” he said, punching in the code that made a flat image appear as a three dee holo in the center of the table.

“Is that Charlotte?” cried Kristen. “Yes! It is! Where is she?”

Matt smiled at his Mom and at Eliana’s happy look. “On Thuringia, at the farmstead of Governor Metzenbaum.
Somehow she escaped from her Meligun owner on planet Module, got a false ID disk, made it to the Commerce Station and convinced a Hootnai ship captain to transport her to Thuringia on the promise of a big reward. Which Metzenbaum paid.” Matt licked dry lips, sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. The outlandish image of his sister filled his mind and heart. While the wild hairstyle and facial zebra stripes were distracting, her hazel eyes and determined expression were an exact match for his last memory of her. He blinked and reached across the hold his mother’s hand. “Mom, she’s alive! And safe with Governor Metzenbaum. He will take steps to hide her away. And Charlotte’s wild look is intended to make hard an automated search for a female human of a certain height. Her owner Nak ho-mesk is a money transfer expert used to working at the boundaries of Anarchate banking systems. He will surely complain to the agency for tracking of lost property. Charlotte will eventually be tracked to Thuringia. But there is no obvious connection to me. To us. To our anti-cloneslavery crusade.”

Eliana’s happy look turned scheming serious. “So does the fleet change our destination from Megil to Thuringia?”

Matt nodded slowly, feeling the way a son does when he has pleased his mother. It was the proud look in his Mom’s eyes that meant the most to him. “Yes. Mata Hari?”

His AI ally blossomed into her full-size holo, dressed in the frilly white dress of her WWI Mata Hari Spy
persona. Her dark eyes ignored the holo, which she’d already perceived during the ship’s reception of the tachlink signal, and focused on him. “Hello Matthew. Kristen and Eliana. You need help?”

Matt felt Mata Hari in his mind
. Her essence was gigantic, in keeping with the complexity of a two kilometer long starship. But there was also the people-person essence of her that had grown wonderfully over the last year. She now felt like a lifelong friend whom Matt had known in both good times and hard. But her talk a month ago about she and Gatekeeper wanting a baby AI had left him wondering many things about her.

“Yes, Mata Hari. I do need help.
My sister Charlotte is on Thuringia, not on Megil,” he said, knowing her emotional side would welcome feeling his happiness. “Though she arrived by private commercial transport, she passed through the ID monitor at Elios Port arrival hall. How long will it take the Anarchate to track her to Thuringia? And how long before we ourselves arrive at the system?”

Mata Hari crossed her olive-skinned arms just below her bodice and looked intent. “
Our time to Thuringia is seven more hours. Since we inbound toward Earth from Antares A, which is 550 light years from Earth, changing our Translation exit point from Alkalurops C star to Thuringia’s Pi-3 Orion star is simple. Just a matter of going another ninety light years further.”

Matt nodded, trying to keep in his mind’s-eye the Orion Arm space holo that showed relative locations of
Module’s 51 Pegasi star, Antares A, Alkalurops C, Pi-3 Orion and Earth’s Sol. “And the Anarchate time to track her to Thuringia?”

Mata Hari spread wide her arms. “They could know that now, assuming this Meligun owner person has declared her as missing property and paid a small bribe to expedite some Anarchate official on Module
. All that is needed is a tachlink search of Arrival Hall ID records for all Human colony worlds within a few hundred light years of 51 Pegasi.”

His Mom looked
confused by the star reference. Eliana remained in her ‘solve the problem’ self of intense focus. Matt worked at staying emotionless. “Can you make a guess? We’ve been in transit for seven hours. We know that Charlotte went missing several days ago. And our rescue of my Mom at Antares A system is bound to distract the chief of the new Anarchate Intel Base.”

Mata Hari reached up to touch
the white pearl broach at her neck, her expression thoughtful. “Many guesses are possible. First, the lost property function of the Anarchate is separate from the Sector 14 Intel Base command. Second, the three dee holo image of Charlotte provided by this Meligun owner to the search department looks very different from the way your sister appears now as she arrived at Elios Port. It will require live eyes, or podeyes, to scan arrival databases for the five Human colony worlds within this small part of Orion Arm. Searches by living people take longer than automated searches.” She paused, then shrugged. “I would guess that the Anarchate knows of Charlotte’s arrival on Thuringia either now, or surely by the time of our fleet’s arrival at the heliopause of Pi-3 Orion. Which arrival will surely alert the Anarchate base on Thuringia’s moon of Pearl.”

Matt nodded. He had two proble
ms to solve. How to arrive in Pi-3 Orion system without detection. And how to rescue his sister from somewhere on Thuringia, some place the governor would have sent her to hide. For certain, Metzenbaum’s talk with her on the planetary comlink would be in the civil archive record and be something known to any investigator. Matt looked at all three women. “Ladies, maybe we could repeat our Antares A hideout and exit Translation on the side of Thuringia’s star that is opposite from the planet’s current location?”

Eliana shook her head. “Sorry, Matt. Won’t work.
The G2V main sequence star of Pi-3 Orion is far too small to mask our gravity wave pulses if we arrive just beyond the one AU No Translation zone. Second, when Yorkel’s fleet arrived at this system, before his battle with us near the Crab Nebula, he surely distributed tachRemotes, sensorRemotes, stealthed sleds and thousands of Seek/Identify sensors throughout the system.” She gave him an apologetic look. “Odds are our arrival on the far side of the system would be detected quickly.”

“Damn. You’re right.”
He thought hard. “Well, I don’t want the fleet appearing ten or twenty light years away. While I can enter the system on my ship’s Dark Energy stardrive, I want the rest of Hexagon Prime fleet nearby. In case this new Sector Captain shows up capture Charlotte.”

Kristen frowned. “Matt, is it likely this new fleet captain will seek a new battle with you? From what Mata Hari and Eliana shared with me while you recovered, the Anarchate lost eight battleglobes in the Antares B battle, plus another four battleglobes from your attack
on planet Working. And the battle left at least three battleglobes damaged. Maybe his fleet is back at base, repairing and refitting?”

Matt gave his Mom a whistle of appreciation. “Mom, now I see where Charlotte
got the smarts and the stubbornness to escape her master once she heard I was shaking up the Anarchate. And your own escape from your Mican owner was inventive too. And sneaky. I like sneaky.”

“Thank you, Matthew.” She smiled, sat back and smoothed the creases in
the pale blue
cheongsam
dress loaned her by Eliana. “I had planned to steal a vacsuit and make it to a hideaway among the ravines near the skyrises. Figured the Aliens in charge would give up once they lost my tracker nodule and found no evidence of my physical remains.”

“Might have worked, Mom. And yes, this new fleet captain may well be at base rather than tracking after Charlotte. Which leaves us to worry only about the new Intel Base boss and his spies. Like this Medun person.” He looked at Eliana. “Mistress, do you or Suzanne precog anything about the new leaders we are now dealing with? Like the Dolmat Sector Captain of the fleet, or the person in charge of the Intel Base?”

Eliana shook her head. “The sense we both got of the Dolmat captain was that he is energetic, sharp, persistent and inventive in his approach to space combat. We could sense that he has one more tactical surprise waiting to be used, beyond the nova blast and black hole shooters.” She paused, her expression going distant momentarily. “We do sense this Medun being active on Thuringia in the near future. Medun’s sense of his boss, based on the mental readings we got while in Antares A system, was that the new Intel chief is of an amphibian species with a shell. Maybe a Loglan or Nik-nik thot species.”

Matt hoped it was neither. Both species were known for outstanding research on any problem assigned them, with a species focus on completing every assignment given a member. The two amphibian species had a reputation for never giving up. Kind of like how he felt often. He smiled at his audience.

“Okay. This is how it will be. This fleet will exit Translation on the heliopause side of Muddysomething, fifth planet in my home system. Kind of a super-Jupiter planet. There is an asteroid belt lying between Muddysomething and Thuringia. Arrival on the planet’s far side will mask our gravity wave pulses if we arrive close to its upper atmosphere. Then I will take my ship, go to Dark Energy stardrive, and arrive on the daylight side of Thuringia. The neutrino emissions of my home star will mask the neutrino emissions of
Mata Hari’s
fusion plants. Then my ship will go to Alcubierre stealth shielding while I take shuttle
Ariadne
down to search for my sister.”