Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) (32 page)

His weather-beaten face showed a friendly smile. “Yes, mistress. I bow to your greater combat experience with these exotic T’Chak warships.”

Sarah pulled her mind focus inward, assuming the Greek stoic mood that she had found useful in all past combat. Avoiding emotional reactions the way Matt did made excellent sense. Doing her part as a member of Hexagon Prime fleet would go a long ways toward preserving the life of her young lover.

Matt went back into
ocean-time
mindlink once they reached three-fourths lightspeed in the normal space-time universe. While their ships had been hit several times by x-ray Picket Globes and several stealthed Thermonuke sleds that had fallen to their proton beams, he knew the Dolmat fleet commander was watching their every movement through the FTL vision of deployed tachRemotes. Their view of the enemy fleet, though, was several hours old even as they passed planet six, a gas giant twice the size of Jupiter. Well, one of the nice advantages of traveling by Alcubierre Star Drive was that while you retained your entry speed, your exit orientation could be from any angle. So rather than continue to approach parallel to the plane of planetary ecliptic, they would come in at a right angle. If they exited just ahead of the planet’s orbital movement, and to one side of its moon-planet alignment, they would avoid passing between the Anarchate fleet and the planet. The urban city of Sharp Claw would be within 100,000 kilometers at their closest approach. And if they kept their time in system to five seconds, they should avoid being an easy target.

“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 had 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 unsta
ble. 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.