Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) (33 page)

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, i
s 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 neurolink. 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.

Running Leader’s fear was realized as first one battleglobe blew up, then a second, third and fourth in a pattern that paralleled  the oncoming image of a fire-breathing reptile starship that emitted purple clouds of plasma from his purple-scaled snout. While the plasma globes traveled at just lightspeed, whatever weapon had just penetrated the Alcubierre Bubbles of four herd mates moved faster. In his mind he felt the local space-time begin to shimmer as the Alcubierre Drive module of his battleglobe reacted to his neurolink command.

“Move!” he cried to the fifteen other ship captains. “Change your vector line! And Translate away from here!”

Matt felt a touch of pleasure as his Stasis Beam swept ove
r four battleglobes, giving each ship’s Command Core AI only one option. To obey the Anarchate prime directive that any battleglobe which lacked a living crew must destroy itself to prevent capture by a presumed enemy. After all, only a deadly enemy could somehow penetrate the normal EMF shields and 300 meter thick armor of a twelve kilometer-wide, Nova-class battleglobe. And such an enemy could not be allowed to learn battleglobe secrets or the coordinates of Anarchate worlds.

The remaining sixteen battleglobes shimmered with Translation startup fields.

“No!” he cried as he aimed the Stasis Beam at another four battleglobes.

Two blue-white matter-to-energy explosions spread across the black space formerly occupied by an Anarchate fleet. The remaining fourteen battleglobes vanished to reappear somewhere else. Where? There would be gravity wave pulses showing their emergence anywhere within three light years of the Hootnai system.

Sarah pulled Eliana’s combat suit into her Bridge, along with the purple geodesic dome of Altuna the AI. Her own ship AI Imperial overrode her
ocean-time
thoughts in an imperious sense that buffeted her mind with  its force.

“Translation elsewhere is strongly advised! Multiple inbound Assault Asteroids, Supply Tubes and black hole clusters! Even with the Translation departure of enemy fleet, this space-time is too deadly to remain.”

“Agreed!” She used PET thought-images to order immediate Translation entry for her ship and her five battle allies. “We head three light years out! That is beyond planetary detection range. And Matt will join us soon!

Allowing her AI to control ship operations, Sarah left
ocean-time
, felt shaky beyond belief, then stepped out of her Interlock Pit to grab the unconscious naked woman who was being tractored over to an accel-couch by her suit’s Tactical CPU.

“I’ve got her, suit!”

“Releasing,” said the male voice of Eliana’s suit, a voice that sounded much like Matt’s baritone.

“Mistress,” called the purple globe of Altuna the AI
. “May I assist you with my tractors? My . . . Eliana part was knocked out by the force of ship disintegration.”

“Yes,” Sarah said, moving back to allow the tender-sounding AI who resembled the black dragon shape of Matt’s BattleMind to control the placement of Eliana into a nearby accel-couch. “Radiation exposure? Will she live?”

“Yes,” murmured the tender voice of Altuna. “My Eliana component was shielded by her combat suit’s EMF field and armor layers. However, this new radiation is added to what she suffered during the Thuringia rescue of Matthew’s sister. She will show severe reddening of her skin. Her lack of skin color makes her especially vulnerable to radiation damage.”

“Her eyes? Will she see? And her ovaries? Can she still—
”

“Normal function is indicated,” said Altuna as the purple globe neared the accel-couch in which it had deposited Eliana’s white body. “Vision and reproduction abilities
were not damaged.”

How?
she thought. Then spoke aloud her question. “How could she be that close to a multi-megaton thermonuke blast and not be internally damaged?”

“She was shielded,” said the purple globe as its hover on Nullgrav became shaky. “I interposed my physical body between her suit and the explosion source. My metal is hardened against gamma and x-rays while my local EMF field repels ionized and charged particles. But—
”

The purple globe fell toward the gravplate deck of Bridge.

The fall was stopped by Imperial’s tractor beam. “Sarah my partner, Eliana’s AI Altuna has lost its Nullgrav hover ability. The hover module was burned out by radiation. And one fourth of its memory crystals have been randomized by gamma ray impacts on the side of its shell that faced the ship blast. May I help it recover awareness?”

“Of course!
”

Sarah sat down on the padded arm of Eliana’s accel-couch.  Exhaustion from
ocean-time
linkage hit her like a tidal wave. But she refused to lose awareness. When a fellow human and their AI partner had both suffered injury in the fight against cloneslavery, Sarah would not allow herself the balm of passing out until they were all safe. Including Matthew.

# # #

Matt
’s eyes filled with tears even as he stayed in
ocean-time
linkage with Sarah’s mind, the minds of Mata Hari and BattleMind, and his Hexagon Prime co-pilots. Who deserved his attention before he crawled away to block his emotions from leaking into their joint mind communion.

Four seconds,
542 milliseconds, 12 nanoseconds, 36 picoseconds and 71 femtoseconds
.

“George!” he called to his black-bearded battlemate, whose grey eyes fixed on Matt even as the
six of them hovered in the mental Park habitat of his memory. “Please take care of leading the fleet upon our departure from Translation. We all need to check our ships for needed repairs even as we stay alert for any gravity wave pulses that signal pursuit by this Dolmat fleet captain!”

Suzanne’s face bloomed into their shared mind communion. Her blue eyes
showed red circles. The Swede’s mind emotion was overwhelming.

“Eliana
will live! And see. And have children some day,” she murmured as her gaze went distant briefly. “She will show a reddish rad burn for a few days.” Then her mental attention locked onto Matt.

“Matthew, that was crazy going after the Anarchate fleet with your shields down! You could have been destroyed!”

He knew that. He also knew that he only wanted to put the fear of an eternity of pain into the mind of this Dolmat fleet captain. A fleet leader who was even more inventive and more dangerous than the former Sector Captain Yorkel. Even now his stone cold mind fought the surge of “Revenge” emotion. An emotion that he knew each of his human allies felt and perhaps shared.