Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) (39 page)

The Spine hallway hatch hissed open. In walked Eliana wearing her combat suit. “Matt! Did you see that tachnet broadcast?”

“Yes,” said Matt even as Charlotte also said “Yes.”

Eliana’s
deep green eyes swept over Mata Hari, Matt, herself and her Mom. “Matthew, you realize this is another trap effort?”

“Of course I do.” Her waved Eliana to join them in an accel-couch as he focused on Mata Hari. “My
favorite AI, a key question. That clone of Charlotte was vat-raised from her cells and born shortly after my family’s capture. That clone is imprinted with the “Obey or feel pain” mind engram. You know human biology from your cyborg work on me. Can that engram imprinting be removed?”

Mata Hari’s
holo persona changed in a flash to the white of her WWI Spy persona, her hands crossed over the waist of the Late Victorian gown she wore. Her black eyes fixed on Matt. “No. I regret my answer. But the whole point of mind engram imprinting is to guarantee to the cloneslave buyer a slave whose life-long devotion is to obey every wish of her owner.”

Matt’s jaw tightened. He blinked several times. Then he looked back at their Mom, herself and Eliana. “Ladies, that means I
have
to go to this star system and kill that clone of Charlotte. I will not allow a clone of my sister to be used and abused by the Anarchate!”

Charlotte wondered briefly if the clone copy of herself could somehow be a new sister to her. Then she reca
lled the subservient manner of Alien cloneslaves that she had seen when traveling with her Meligun master. The clones had been more than a servant slave. They had been almost animal-like in their efforts to please the demands of their owners. She looked back at her Mom and Eliana.

“Mom, take it from me. Matt is right. That clone of me could never become my sister. Or a new daughter of yours,” she said, a sniffle of sadness escaping. “
Eliana, this abomination
must
be removed from life. She has no will of her own, no self-identity. This . . . this cloneslave is why yours and Matt’s crusade is essential to all life in the Milky Way.” She blinked and looked back at a sober faced Matt. “Brother, please tell Mata Hari to implant that cyborg socket in my neck. And to make a combat suit for me, like the one Eliana is wearing. Whatever my far future may hold, my present requires me to join with you, with Eliana, with everyone else in fighting for the end of cloneslavery!”

“Charlotte, no!
No!” cried her Mom. “Matthew, don’t pull my only living daughter into this fight against the Anarchate. The Aliens will destroy you and her!”

Matthew, facing their
mother, shrugged like Charlotte herself often did, as if it were a family genecode. He slowly smiled at their mother. “Mom, I rescued you and Charlotte so neither of you could be used like this clone. You lived for fifteen years on the planet Working, with your Mican owner. Do you think
he
would have treated you nicer if you had been a cloneslave?”

A long silence. “No,” whispered her Mom.

Matthew, still smiling amiably, looked at Charlotte. “My sister, welcome to the fleet. We have four thousand light years to go before we get to this gas giant refueling stop. Which will be a trap for me,” he said nonchalantly. “That is weeks away. Time enough for the surgery to implant a neck socket and to implant the tachlink module behind your left ear. With the socket and the module, you will
always
be in the minds of the members of Hexagon Prime fleet.”

Charlotte nodded slowly. “Will the mind communion be really weird?”

Eliana chuckled from behind her. She turned to see the woman who had become her brother’s lifepartner. A woman who had once hated AIs. “Young lady, you have not felt
weird
until you have touched minds with the three-lobbed brain of Toktaleen the Brokeet! Giant ants have a mental worldview unlike any human culture!” Eliana stepped back to the rear wall of the Bridge, then her combat suit bent forward. She heard a hiss like a gasket seal opening. Out stepped Eliana, completely nude and with her arboreal tail whipping from side to side as she walked over to an accel-couch that lay to the right of Matt. She lifted a bare foot and stepped into the accel-couch, sat down and showed no reaction as a silvery fiber optic cable socketed into her neck. She waved at Matthew. “Walking around a starship bare-skin naked will not seem weird at all!”

“Oh, Matthew,” moaned her Mom.

Charlotte grinned. “Hey Mom! Watch me when I get my own combat suit! I’m gonna outshoot Matt, Eliana and everyone else on the laser rifle range!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Matt stood in Suit on the armory’s shooting range, watching his sister Charlotte use her combat suit’s shoulder mounted laser pulse-cannons to deadly effect against small Spy Eyes, nanoShells, gyrocopters and a rolling ball loaded with explosives. But the steel grey ball had a coating of sapphire crystals which deflected the low power laser beams aimed at it. The ball continued rolling toward his sister, aiming to get close enough to ‘kill’ her with an explosive blast. Charlotte flung out both arms and began hitting the ball with her fingertip lasers as her shoulder cannons changed laser frequencies to reach below the sapphire crystals on the surface. The ball showed a few scorch marks but still kept coming. Feeling his sister’s mind as she thought swiftly, he smiled as she adopted the one, two, three punch scenario that Matt knew her suit Tactical CPU was suggesting.

The rolling ball shuddered to a stop as Charlotte’s waist pack of ultrasonic vibers focused on the ball. The rocket gun tubes on each bicep
ka-thumped
as each tube shot out titanium penetrator darts followed by clusters of nanoShells set for white noise blockage and silicon chip fracturing. In less than a second the rolling ball showed a dozen holes from penetrator darts, then a swarm of tiny nanoware energy seekers entered the holes and began to take apart the ball from the inside out. In another second a thermite rocket shell began to melt through the ball’s innards even as its steel skin fractured and began to come apart like an egg shell, thanks to the release of ultra frigid nitrogen within the ball. At the end, the ball opened up like an apple split into a dozen vertical segments. Two blasts from Charlotte’s shoulder lasers sufficed to melt down the remnants of the ball’s programming Core.

“Nicely done,” called Eliana’s external
Talker as she stood in her own armored suit, watching her star pupil.

Matt gave his sister an encouraging mental smile, then gestured with his gauntlet. “Your switch to the m
ulti-prong attack was well-done,” he said, using both mindspeech and Suit’s external Talker. “Including the melting of the memory Core. Never forget that while your organic opponent can die, pre-programmed attack actions live on within its combat suit so long as suit power is working and broadcast signals can reach servo mechanisms.”

Charlotte’s mind image of herself smiled at Matt. “Thanks my brother! And you too Eliana! You both helped me find the way to ‘relax into’ being at one with my suit’s Tactical CPU.”

“You performed adequately,” said the motherly voice of Charlotte’s Tactical CPU.

Matt thought that voice resembled the voice of their mother Kristen, who had pleaded the need to
give nutrients and water to the rose bushes in the Park habitat. His mother did not like seeing her daughter become a human-cyborg killing machine. But the tough woman who’d survived being a labor slave to a Mican griffin-tiger was also in the Park because that was where Gatekeeper, the AI partner of Mata Hari, spent most of his time. The former casino manager for Omega Casino had taken the soil, grass, plants, small trees, insects and a few tiny shrew-like mammals from Morrigan and created a true Park environment. A lifeweb place of living things that welcomed people of all species. Seeing his Mom treat the silvery mind globe of Gatekeeper as if the AI were an adopted son both amused Matt and pleased him.

Charlotte appeared on one side of Matt’s Faceplate, even as she turned in her suit to face Matt and Eliana. Behind his sister the approach of small Spy Eyes and nanoShells that sought to attack her was defeated by the pressor beams emitted from her suit’s armored helmet. “
Matt,” she said as her mind welcomed in Eliana and the red cloud of Mata Hari to their mental conference. “Do you think I’m ready to socket into your ship and get a ‘feel’ for a real living and thinking T’Chak Dreadnought ship?”

That was the core issue they had all faced during the weeks of their
Translation travel counter-spinward, toward the blue-white star where the clone copy of Charlotte would be waiting to entrap them. In another day all seven ships of Hexagon Prime fleet would exit Translation at a spot three light years out from HD 86523. Whatever Anarchate ships held station beside the gas giant would detect their gravity pulses and know they had arrived. The enemy ship commander would likely wonder why they had not Translated into a close flyby of the gas giant, the way his fleet had often done. Well, this time they would not do things the way they’d done them before. As Sun Tzu had written in his small book
The Art Of War
—
Now war is based on deception. Move when it is advantageous and create changes in the situation by dispersal and concentration of forces
.

Matt gave Charlotte a mental half-smile. “Yes, you are welcome to ‘socket in’ while sitting in one of the accel-couches. Mata Hari will guide your exploration of this ship. It is a wonder!”

Eliana’s beautiful mind moved to give Charlotte a mental hug. “Young woman who is nearly my age, being in mindlink like this is a true wonder. You will experience
ocean-time
thinking at true computer speeds once you mindlink with Mata Hari. You will also ‘feel’ the inner emotions of every person who shares mindlink with you.”

Matt
also mentally hugged his sister. “Charlotte, you’ve shared your fifteen years of labor slave living with me and everyone via this mindlink we now share,” he said in mindvoice. “What I have seen of your resourcefulness while pretending to be a dutiful slave for your Meligun bear owner tells me you can handle the multi-level thinking and fighting that is required to be a pilot for a T’Chak ship like my
Mata Hari
Dreadnought.”

Eliana’s
mind gave Matt a hug, then turned to Charlotte. “My sister of the mind, come with me to the Bridge and I will show you around this ship while in mindlink with it!”

Matt watched the women
for whom he cared most. Eliana had given him the gift of her love. And her support in his efforts to eradicate cloneslavery. Soon, he would give her what she most desired. Meanwhile, Charlotte and his Mom had mostly healed his feelings of guilt for being the sole escapee of the genome harvester attack on their family farm. The two periods of long Translation had allowed the Welsh captive Gareth Davies to spend time with Ben on his ship, as he ‘learned the ropes’ of how to behave at slow real-time speeds. And Toktaleen had similarly welcomed the Meligun and Orko captives they’d rescued from the cloneslaver base. The two had worked together on creating a Park habitat on the Brokeet’s starship.

Now he must tend to the needs of the other members of his ‘mind family
.’ Ben the Aussie, George the battlemate, Sarah the organizer, Rafael the schemer, Toktaleen the deep thinker and Suzanne the precog who like him was a native of Thuringia, they all deserved the best he could do as the commander of a war. A war where ethics, not greed or power, were the driving force.

Running Leader
inspected the composition of star HD 86523 as depicted in the front holosphere of the Bridge of
Defiant II
. First there was the B3V blue-white main sequence star. A few million
nipads
out from the star’s corona lay a small, airless, rocky planet where molten rock covered the side of the planet that was tidally locked due its closeness to the star. The planet’s dark side was frozen coldness. Next out at an orbital spot where liquid water was possible lay a wide asteroid belt. For some reason the asteroids and planetesimals had never formed into a planet. Or a planet had once existed and then broken apart. In the third orbital range lay the red and orange-banded gas giant above which his ship, his fellow battleglobe
Dedicated
and the Courier
Meltiades
orbited.

He ignored the automated Supply sleds that moved from each ship of his small fleet to the local gas giant’s atmospheric refining station. He ignored the record of hydrogen, helium, ammonia, methane, nitrogen and similar gases that the station sifted for hydrogen isotopes.
They had been in place for three days with no sign of the renegade Human. The renegade should appear soon, since the distance each had to cover from the Orion Nebula battle to here was nearly identical.