Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) (36 page)

Matt smiled, unable to resist Ben’s tempting pause. “Well, Ben, what makes one a survivor in the Aussie bush?”

Ben gave him a wry smile. “Endurance.”

Matt knew the young man would stick with Sarah no matter what. And he would fight his ship as part of their fleet to the utmost of his abilities. The daring he had shown while being interviewed at the Intel Base by Commander Chai
, with its neurowhip punishment, was present in the man’s single word reply. And Matt agreed with him. He focused on Rafael of the long black mustache and swarthy skin, a man who liked his flamenco music and adored the holo pictures of his wife and family.

“Rafael?”

His South American battle ally stood up from his squat. He pushed thumbs into his jeans and looked everyone over before returning to Matt. “Seems to me our tachlink mindlinks are gonna be vital to a battle that will be very dangerous. I suggest we each take advantage as solo ships, taking shots as they happen. And Translating to gain a shooting angle at an exposed battleglobe. Staying together in the Hub-and-Wheel pattern makes us a concentrated target for a spread of black holes.”

Matt nodded, then looked to
brown-skinned Sarah, the fifty-something corporate manager at Omega Casino who had spoken for her fellow managers during the trip from Omega Casino to Morrigan. Her blue eyes fixed on him with a no nonsense look.

“Matthew, we attack in multiple vectors,” she said, reaching out to point to a
new holo of the construction zone in the middle of the protoplanetary disk of dust, pebbles, rock and small asteroids. “The factories and habitat are concentrated in this sector, where metal rich dust clouds are thick. The fleet of the Dolmat captain is elsewhere, in this mined out open space zone.” As she spoke each zone glowed with green light. “Matt, you and ship
Mata Hari
should exit Translation at a right angle to the ecliptic plane, just north of the hollow shell of the fleet. As your ship races by, use your Stasis Beam to take out three or four battleglobes at the central equator zone of the fleet shell.” A third area in the cluster of fourteen battleglobes glowed green. “As they explode per the computer program installed in every battleglobe, the six of us should approach on the plane of the ecliptic like a spearhead aimed at the dead ship hole you just created. We fire all our antimatter beams through the hole you create into the undefended backs of the battleglobes on the opposite side from our approach. That’s thirty-six AM beams. We should be able to reduce their fleet by half with that single barrage.” Sarah looked at him. “Matthew, you Translate back into the interior of their globe with a heading aimed along the path we take incoming. That allows you to exit Translation at speed, fire while you are inside the globe, then move at speed into the protoplanetary clouds. With your pressor shields up to deflect Remotes, sensorBeads, dust, KKVs and anything else in your path that is solid.”

Matt nodded. “And the rest of the fleet goes where? After the initial
AM barrage.”

Sarah smiled slowly. “We Translate the quarter light-second over to the factories and habitat, hit them with antimatter and proton beams, then jump back to this place where we now float.”

Matt felt everyone’s approval of Sarah’s mix of solo and fleet action. He approved of it too. It made maximum use of their strengths, exposed them minimally to in place weapons, and resulted in the destruction of the factories, the worker habitat and the near destruction of the Dolmat’s fleet.

“Sarah, did anyone ever tell you that you are one hell of a manager?”

She grinned big, glancing aside at Ben’s half-smile of approval, then to all of them. “Well, after all, this is the kind of planning I did at Omega Casino.”

Eliana split her mental attention, part to public approval of Sarah’s plan. And part to talk to him. “Matthew, let me help you with weapons deployment from a Bridge accel-couch. It will allow you to focus more on maneuvering and dealing with any surprises.”

“You are welcome to join me on the Bridge.” He split a private part of his mind attention to her. “I love you. I’m sorry you got hurt. And I will ask Immovable to send an unmanned T’Chak ship to Morrigan so you and Altuna can once again command a Dreadnought.”

Eliana’s gaze turned soft. “Thank you. Thank you so much. But now, we have to prepare for whatever surprises this Dolmat ship captain has in store for us.
It arrived here before we did. Which means it picked up our gravity wave pulses. It’s had time to prepare for us.”

“Yes it has,” Matt said. “But we never give up. And as young Ben said, we endure.”

Running Leader rested on his Command Bench, his fourteen battleglobes gathered in the spike-tail formation with their Alcubierre Bubbles activated and aimed outward to intersect any incoming antimatter beams. It had proven useful during the battle at the Hootnai colony in NGC 6397 star cluster. But the flyby of a single T’Chak ship, its shape that of a fire-breathing reptile, had hit six battleglobes with a pink beam that caused each ship to explode short milliseconds later. The rest of his fleet had Translated out ten light years to escape this new weapon. Ever since then, during their return to the shipyard and their deployment into a defense of the five factories and habitat globe, his combat scientists had sought an answer to what had so harmed them. A holo took shape before him. It was his Chief Combat Engineer, one Flying Death of the Mican species.

“Sector Captain,” growled the being who mixed a four-legged carnivore form with
two dirty brown wings. It fixed three mobile eyes on him with a feral intensity that he, Defender of the Herd, did not care for. The purple eyes blinked slowly. “My work group has analyzed the sensorBead and vidcast records of the attack by the single T’Chak ship. We conclude the pink beam was not the usual proton laser beam, but a stasis beam. It penetrated our bubble shields and put every crew member into suspended animation. Their life signs disappeared to normal ship sensors.”

“
The ships blew themselves up!” Running Leader croaked angrily.

“Yes,” growled Flying Death, its
needle-tipped tail whipping from one side to the other. “We are working on an algorithm that will reverse the Command Core’s programming to auto-destruct upon loss of life signs.” One of the Mican’s fleshy eye cones looked sideways. “I am motivating my programmers with a neurowhip but we do not have a finished algorithm. Yet.”

Running Leader noticed how the Mican’s
two small flexhands curled into fists, their digits claw-tipped. Red blood appeared at the point where claws touched palms. The feather ruff that ran down its back and between the two wings flared up in some body language sign. “Thank you for your efforts, Chief Combat Engineer Flying Death. Please expedite this algorithm. We are easily destroyed if attacked again by this stasis-wielding warship.”

“Understood,” growled the Mican in guttural Belizel
.

The engineer’s
wings flared up then smashed back against its muscled body, conveying an anger at its staff that Running Leader did not care for. “You are excused.” The holo vanished. He looked around the Bridge.

Executive Officer Malel stood to his right, his brown-
armored body encircled by a ring of datapanels and WorkPads. Tactical Chief Lark’s hairy form stood before his Tactical Cluster, his focus on the thousands of tachRemotes they had seeded throughout the protoplanetary disk of CC32415. The ship’s front holosphere showed the bright stars of the Trapezium and the billowing clouds of charged particles that were collapsing into brown dwarfs on their way to becoming true stars. The center of the shipyard’s system had no star yet, just the massive brown dwarf that awaited enough matter infall to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

“Sector Captain,” called Chief Lark. “The amount of dispersed munitions, magnetic mines, X-ray Picket Globes,
sensorRemotes, Offense sleds, Thermonuke sleds, plasma torps, and Fire-and-Forget missiles has reached a total of forty thousand devices.” The Tactical officer’s stance suggested worry combined with hope.

“Understood,” Running Leader
said as he looked to the WorkPads and datapanels that bordered his Command Bench. “Any gravity pulse signals?”

“Yes, but only the ones we
detected just moments ago,” Lark said, activating a holo pedestal that showed the system’s disk. “One came from a small craft that appears to be a shuttle. One of our Corvettes is chasing after it, but the craft is hiding behind asteroids.”

“And the other pulses?”

“Seven that appeared one light cycle out.” Lark’s claw-hand gestured at the multi-spectral holo. “Without doubt they are the enemy fleet that fought us in the Hootnai system.”

“Without a doubt. Alert the factories to activate their mining lasers for defense. And have the habitat move to emergency pressurization procedures,”
he ordered.

Turning to his own WorkPads,
Running Leader made sure the x-ray Picket Globes were set on autofire to blast x-rays at the vector line of a gravity wave pulse. Many would miss the Human’s warships, but some would impact. Hopefully before the Human fleet raised its Alcubierre shields. Lying in stealth mode were dozens of 30 megaton bomb Thermonuke sleds that could achieve one-quarter lightspeed on their own. The sleds were also set on autofire mode to accelerate toward the incoming vector line. Finally, his outlying x-ray Picket Globes were set on autofire since they would have only femtoseconds in which to sense the gravity wave of the Human fleet’s emergence into normal space-time, then fire at the gravity wave vector. Again, most would miss. But a few might impact before the shields went up.

“Captain!” cried Yanakutt from NavCore. “A gravity wave pulse just above us!”

Matt exited the greyness of Alcubierre space-time with his ship’s nose pointed down at the hollow shell of fourteen battleglobes, his speed just one-fourth light and his vector aimed to cross the ecliptic of the protoplanetary disk. Just as Sarah had proposed. His real-time image of the dusty brown disk lasted just seven femtoseconds, then went grey as Mata Hari raised their shields. The image returned as ejected sensorBeads, tachRemotes and plasma torps gave him an FTL image of what lay ahead. That was supplemented by the tachVid images from Remotes shot at the shipyard by
Ariadne
when the shuttle had Translated into the construction zone just minutes earlier.

Swimming in
ocean-time
linkage with Mata Hari, BattleMind, Eliana and every other pilot and AI of his fleet, Matt saw they would pass within a quarter light second of the battleglobe shell. The shell resembled a bunch of grey balls arranged in a round shell. With bubble walls touching each other, there were no open spaces through which his ship could insert an antimatter beam. Well, his job was opening a hole in that bubble wall. And he would not fail!

“Eject Black Holes!” Running Leader croaked. “Have the nearby Supply Tubes emit antimatter!
Fire proton beams continuously at the incoming enemy!”

A holo of the Mican Flying Death took form before him. “The Defense algorithm is finished! To which—
”

“Every ship!”
cried Running Leader.

“Ten seconds will suffice!” roared Flying Death.

“In ten seconds we may all—”

Matt’s ship
Mata Hari
projected multiple pressor beams ahead of the ship’s crocodile snout, aiming for a cone that would shunt aside any antimatter and black holes that might lie in their path. He had agreed with Eliana that a repeat of his unshielded attack was not smart this time. Not when the Dolmat fleet captain had had time to prepare a defense.

Blue-white explosions filled nearby space as Picket Globes sent coherent x-rays against
Mata Hari
, hoping for a break in the Alcubierre shielding.

Pink proton laser beams shot at him from the upper battleglobes of the Anarchate shell, seeking entry.

Assault Asteroids left stealth and went to one-quarter lightspeed, aiming to impact him along his vector course.

Supply Tubes did the same, their unmanned
Command Cores seeking their own immolation in an antimatter cloud that included Matt’s ship.

A Thermonuke sled blew its 30 megaton warhead against the nose of his ship. The shield stayed up.

Dispersed Remotes, tachlinks, Spy Eyes, sensorBeads and hundreds of similar Fire-and-Forget Remotes fell into
Mata Hari’s
Alcubierre shields, their signals dying as they were Translated to Elsewhere-Elsewhen.

Matt’s mind splintered into thousands of compartments, each mind parcel dealing with a specific input, option, result and alert.

Nothing could keep up with Matt’s mind. Not the hurried beat of his heart. Not the surge of adrenaline hormones. Not the instinctive muscle reactions as his visual cortex told his body that something was rushing at Matt. They were all too slow.

Two milliseconds, 76 nanoseconds, 23 picoseconds, and 15 femtoseconds
, said his onboard cyberclock as it kept track of time from the instant of their normal-space materialization.

At a distance of
a quarter light second, Matt fired the Stasis Beam at the grey bubbles of the fleet shell. It swept over seven battleglobes thanks to his one-fourth lightspeed vector that made the pink beam brush against multiple targets.