Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) (41 page)

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Matt’s sh
ip arrived just above the three ship cluster of the Dolmat ship, the second battleglobe and the Courier that contained his sister’s clone. Within seven femtoseconds his Alcubierre shields covered the
Mata Hari
completely. Stretching out his multi-spectral perception, Matt perceived a rainstorm of multi-colored particles ranging from neutrino white to gamma ray blue to the purple of ultraviolet. Heat glows showed on the three ships, concentrated at the engines and weapons, with scattered red dots that documented a thousand or so crew persons aboard the three ships. Active sensor scans filled the space around them. Not far away floated x-ray Picket Globes, Thermonuke sleds, a few Assault Asteroids ready to power up and try to materialize within his Alcubierre shields, and hundreds of energyRemotes that sought the energy signatures of intruding Remotes. Like the ones infiltrated by George and now by his ship.

“Mata Hari, are you
r limpet complinks away?”

“Yes,” she said in mindtalk.

Matt gave her a mindpulse of appreciation. “How soon before your complink attaches to the Dolmat battleglobe?”

His AI glowed in his mind in the Lady of the Sword persona, one hand pointing her laser sword toward the three ship cluster, while her dark eyes scanned the space within which they floated. “Attaching now. At the north polar antimatter embrasure. It contains combat control nodes that penetrate the 300 meters of carbon-carbon ablative armor
.” The AI who had come to love him paused, gave a sharp nod. “We’re into the ship’s primary mind Core. My complink is working to circumvent the several layers of encryption and changing comlink frequencies. Nothing we haven’t seen before, in the debris of other battleglobes.” She looked up at Matt, her expression hawk-like. “Done! The ship’s Core mind is under our control. And as you suspected, there is a new algorithm that circumvents the automatic ‘destroy yourself’ order of the Anarchate’s Combat Command. It is safe to apply stasis to this ship and its crew.”

Four hundred thirty-one milliseconds, 132 nanoseconds, 11 picoseconds and 12 femtoseconds
, said his cyberclock.

Matt
gave a dual PET thought-image to Mata Hari and ship systems. “Fire two antimatter beams on the other battleglobe, aiming for its north polar AM battery,” he said in mindlink. “At the same moment sweep the Dolmat battleglobe with the Stasis Beam!”

Focusing his mind on the other six ships of the
Hexagon Prime, he gave a third command. “Translate into this system and materialize in the open space between the gas giant and the inner asteroid belt. There are no Picket Globes or other offensive Remotes in that area. It’s a third of an orbit ahead of where I am located. Stay for just two seconds, then Translate back out to where you are now!” he said, sending a mindimage of his location and its deadly Remotes. “ I will join you with the Dolmat battleglobe in tow.”

Matt focused on the nearby Courier that was even now transmitting a tachnet broadcast of his clone sister.

“Matthew, I miss you,” said the red-headed young woman who perfectly matched his memory of his sister from the day before he’d left the farmstead and taken a skimmer south to Elios Port. Her familiar voice echoed through fifteen years of memory pain. “Please come and visit me? I will share my cloneday birth celebration with you!”

“Fire a three-megaton KKV at the Courier,” he ordered Mata Hari.

She sent him a mindpulse of empathy and sympathy even as she fired the KKV through their Alcubierre shield. At planetary escape velocity, the KKV would cross the few kilometers from his ship to the Courier nearly as fast as normal thought.

Mentally he sought a hideaway for his grief, even as another segment of his mind told Mata Hari to tell the Dolmat battleglobe to enter Translation and follow them to the rendezvous three light years out.

 

 

Running Leader felt the Combat alarm echo through the
Defiant II
. Mental and acoustic clanging sufficient to draw in the dead from the Spectral Side filled his mind and his ears. Ahead on the Bridge the master holo showed the space above them. An occultation of a few stars glowed in purple ultraviolet as Chief Lark’s black whiskers spread wide in the body sign of Fearful Surprise.

“Ship above us!” shrieked the Spelidon as his scaly tail thumped the ship’s metal floor. “Just a few
nipads
away! Now in Alcubierre stealth mode. Cannot fire our black holes at it! Wrong angle. No response from our polar AM embrasure. Maybe the
Dedicated
can—”

A sense
of lassitude filled his body and his mind. He knew it as the feel of stasis that he and other students at the naval academy had been forced to endure. So they could understand the disorientation of long-haul colony ships outbound for a distant world. Sometimes they called the Anarchate for help. Sometimes they—

Frozen thoughts followed him into a single image dream time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

Matt stood near the Interlock Pit, wearing his black and white
yukata
robe, and holding hands with Eliana, who wore a Polynesian
lava-lava
skirt with chest wrap. To his left stood Mata Hari in Spy persona, with the giant black-winged form of BattleMind filling up that portion of the Bridge. To his right, sitting on the arms of their accel-couches, were his sister Charlotte, whose long red ponytail covered her neck socket. Beyond Charlotte stood his nervous mother Kristen, her hazel eyes fixed on the unconscious alien who lay on a long gravpad next to the purple metal globe which housed the mind of Mata Hari. Gatekeeper, the AI partner of Mata Hari, stood beside the purple globe, his holo image that of a Greek farmer with a two day stubble and mud spattered on his brown coveralls. The holo of Mata Hari looked Matt’s way.

“Matthew, shall I bring this Dolmat out of stasis?” she said, gesturing to the six-legged heavyworlder who rested belly-down on a gravpad. Its two eyes were closed, its chest armhands crossed under its blocky head, and its
spike-tail unmoving. “He will feel discomfort since it is earlier than the normal six hours for natural awareness to return.”

“Yes.
And put the image of the star going nova up on the front holo, once the Dolmat shows mental coordination.”

“Countering stasis with a nanoDoc injection,” Mata Hari said as a tiny ornithopter applied an air pressure injection
against the tough hide of the Alien herbivore. “He is restrained under a strong inertial field.”

 

 

Running Leader’s dream mind became active. At which point part of his mind told him he was coming out of stasis. The emergence felt stiffer than at the academy trainin
g session. Slowly he opened his eyes, adjusted vision to the yellow light that was dominant, and wondered why he was surrounded by a crowd of unstable bipeds. A new type of nightmare?

“My crew?” he croaked as recent memory return
ed. “Are they alive? Where are—”

“Your crew is safe in stasis,” said the tall biped with the facial features that matched the Human with the name sigil Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux
. “Your ship is intact, lying a few hundred
nipads
from my fleet. We are three light cycles out from the blue-white star that you came to three days earlier.” The Human paused, then used its left side armhand to gesture toward a holosphere that showed a blue-white star exploding into a nova. “You and your ships were part of a trap to capture me. Your Intel Base High Commander failed to tell you that the Council of Sixteen chose to sacrifice you and your ships by applying your Nova Blast tactic to kill all of us. Upon detection of our gravity wave pulses arriving in system.”

Running Leader
blinked, felt his body restrained by an inertial field, moved his vision to ultraviolet and saw dozens of emissions in that range that filled the Bridge of the Human’s starship, then noticed the shape of a T’Chak avian reptile standing twice his length. Its red eyes, long snout, curving black wings, glowing purple spine arcs, long spike-tail and chest armhands crossed over yellow scales matched the shape of T’Chak ships that he had seen in his battles against this Human. A shimmer to the edge of the T’Chak reptile, and the white-clothed Human female standing beside the reptile told him they were holograms, rather than solid beings. Wishing his spike-tail was mobile so he could slam the floor with his feelings of frustration, he spoke.

“So you say, Human Dragoneaux.” He moved his head slowly, appreciating that at least his head and his armhands were allowed normal movement
within the inertial field. “How did our battle end?”

The Dragoneaux biped looked aside at a line of female Humans, then showed its teeth. The Compendium of Species said that Human exposure of masticating bones was not a threat of eating the person in conversation, but a sign of amusement. Strange species that used standard predator expressions as a sign of amusement.

“You lost. We won. No damage to our fleet.” The Human gestured again at the three dee holo of the exploding star. “In the brief moments when I and my ship were present above your three ships, I used our Stasis Beam to put into stasis all lifeforms within your ship, fired two antimatter beams at the other battleglobe, and fired a thermonuke KKV at the Courier ship.” The Human paused, looked aside at a female adorned with a cranial infestation of red curly fur, then focused its two brown oculars back on him. “The Courier disintegrated. The battleglobe
Dedicated
was seriously damaged, and after the arrival of your ship
Defiant II
and my ship at this spot, we watched
this
over tachRemotes.”

Running Leader observed as the blue-white corona of the local star sped outward at the speed of light. It quickly enveloped the rocky planet in orbit one, then shortly engulfed the wide asteroid belt in the second orbital, and finally ate the
gas giant. And battleglobe
Dedicated
. He did not have the artistic feeling so he could not appreciate the colors of vast streams of atmospheric gas fleeing away from the large planet before it was engulfed by the star’s corona. He fixed both eyes on the Human.

“Interesting imagery. Why should I believe it? And why should I assume it reflects recent events?”

“You crazy fat land lizard you—”

“Stop, Charlotte!” said the Dragoneaux biped to the red-curled Human female that he recognized as the male’s sibling, or sister as the Humans applied the term. Beside the outspoken red-hair stood another Human female, slightly less tall than the
talking female. The shorter female’s head was also infested with red curls, but a few streaks of grey lent a pleasant tone to the overall sickness of pink or red skin. Compared to his own deep brown armor skin, these Human bipeds looked distinctly . . . diseased. However, his memory from the Compendium data file said variable colors for the surface tegument of this species was normal. He turned his head to the rear as his sensitive ears detected the motion of air. Another Human who wore decent brown colors stood behind his gravpad. The slight flicker of the image edge said this Human was also a hologram. He looked to the Dragoneaux biped.

“An interesting mix of bipedal and reptilian holograms, along with sickly appearing Human females,” he said to Dragoneaux. “Is
their appearance the result of living too long within this alien ship?”

The Human female standing beside Dragoneaux whose skin was a pale white while her cranium hosted an infestation of long black threads, barked loudly. His Compendium memory said the bark was ‘laughter
.’ Interesting how, after the recent battle for the defeat and capture of the renegade Human, this female felt like his words were entertainment.

“Sector Captain Running Leader, the skin appearances of the humans standing within our view are normal to our species,” said the female, letting go of her attachment to the Dragoneaux biped’s right armhand. “The holograms your enhanced vision has detected are images of three AIs that are aboard this
Dreadnought-class warship. A fourth AI, name of Altuna, goes with my T’Chak ship.” The Human female paused, perhaps due to thirst as its speech organ licked its thin lips. “That ship is the one you destroyed in the battle at CC4213, in globular cluster NGC 6397.”

Running Leader felt surprise that the pilot of the destroyed T’Chak ship had survived his black hole attack. Still, he had no reason to disbelieve her statement in competent Belizel. “It is clear you control my ship and have access to
its central Core mind. But the rest of what your . . . male partner says could easily be fabricated with some graphics algorithms. So why should I believe any of what this male, name sigil Dragoneaux, has said?”

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