Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) (15 page)

With a touch to his WorkPad,
Yorkel sent seventeen thermonuke Remotes lumbering along the gravity wave vector emitted by the arrival of the Human and his attack cohort. If they were lucky, very lucky, the initial barrage of antimatter and laser beams would distract the Human long enough for some of his thermonuke Remotes to arrive within strike range.

Suzanne’s mind filled with the image of one of their starships disappearing in an antimatter explosion of such power that it stunned her. Now? In the future? When?

“Matthew! Watch out for—”

Matt’s ship senses felt the impact of hundreds of laser and antimatter
beams against the Alcubierre shields he and his battlemates had raised immediately upon exit from Translation, just thirty thousand kilometers from the surface of Salla moon. He had expected immediate attack since their gravity wave pulse would be on a straight-line to the moon. But he had not expected the blossoming of seventeen 30 megaton hydrogen bomb explosions among his ships, impacting on the Alcubierre shields, seeking a means of rendering them vulnerable.

Suzanne’s scream reached him just as his mind-sense of the AI aboard
Ocean
felt alarm, a sense of pain, surprise—

His eyes went wet with tears even as his
ocean-time
mindsense told him the Dreadnought’s side Alcubierre shield had been overwhelmed by the simultaneous explosion of three 30 megaton nukes, leaving his battlemate vulnerable to normal weapon fire.

Ocean
could have survived proton and laser beams, either by using mercury vapor and rotating or by extending a belly Alcubierre shield up to cover the exposed side. But in the ten femtoseconds during which
Ocean’s
side was exposed, an antimatter beam hit that same spot. Its matter to energy conversion combined with onboard reservoirs of antimatter to totally vaporize a member of his Hexagon Prime fleet.

Vengeance will be mine!
BattleMind screamed mentally.

High Captain Yorkel felt exaltation as the holo showed the total destruction of an enemy starship by way of
three thermonuke Remote blasts.
At last!

“High Captain,” called Malel from his WorkPad. “They are firing at us! Sister ship
Noble
has lost half its southern hemisphere to an antimatter beam. What is your command?”

“Translate! Translate to a space behind these maniacs and close to Megil! Quickly if you wish to live!”

BattleMind’s roar of outrage at the death of a fellow T’Chak AI would have sent Matt to his knees if he were not already sitting. As it was, even with Mata Hari buffering the mindflow, he came close to passing out.

“Vengeance is mine too!” he screamed at the ancient T’Chak AI. “Fire on all three of the battleglobes! Vaporize them before they send more thermonukes against our shields!”

Starship
Mata Hari
, joined by ships
Altuna
,
Lorelei
,
Gondu
,
BattleMate
,
Inevitable
and
Flowering
, all fired antimatter barrages against the three battleglobes. A streak of forty-two antimatter beams reached across space at the speed of light, seeking Anarchate victims.

Two were found. One vanished into Translation.

Matt snarled angrily. “Look for their gravity wave pulse! Anywhere! Behind us. Atop. Below. To one side. Find it!”

High Captain Yorkel blinked as they exited Translation. With a click to the AI, he gave the order he hated giving. “Ship AI, broadcast to those ships the offer of valuable intelligence! Say I know where to find Commander Chai!”

Chief Lark slashed his black tail against the metal of the Bridge floor, while his lifelong ally Malel looked at him with four eyes that showed the pink pupils of astonishment.

Yorkel slapped the Alert touchpad.

“We will survive, my battlemates! We have taken one of their ships, but we must survive to warn the rest of Combat Command! This is my aim. Stay with me!”

Matt’s mind split into ten components as the AIs of seven ships fed him data while Eliana, George and Suzanne all shouted in mindvoice, offering advice, suggestions, warnings and deep anger at the sneak attack by the Anarchate battleglobe commander. Then Mata Hari overrode his mental
focus on the gravity wave vector of the surviving battleglobe, sending its voice broadcast into his mind and the minds of everyone else.

“Matthew Dragoneaux, High Captain Yorkel offers you valuable intelligence in return for the survival of his ship. He offers the location of your first enemy, Commander Chai of the Spelidon species.”

Matt’s mind warred against itself. He weighed the value of real time Anarchate intelligence versus his need for vengeance against the killer of the mind of Ocean. She had felt as real to him as Mata Hari, as Suzanne, as real as—

“An imperfect o
rganic?” snarled the giant mindshape of BattleMind. “She was a birth-mate of mine! Eternal Love budded her off just as she budded off me and the minds of every T’Chak ship who has joined your war against the Anarchate. We do not allow any enemy organic to live!”

Thinking of the points made earlier by Suzanne and Eliana about how the
Anarchate had finally awoken to the danger posed by his single ship and his crusade against cloneslavery, Matt showed his feral Vigilante look to BattleMind. “Agreed! She was every bit as real as me or Eliana or George or Suzanne. My ally.”

BattleMind’s angry red ey
es showed surprise and his mindimage flared black wings as if trying to soften a rough landing. “You, you mean what you say, little organic.”

“Of course I do. See my memory of work as a cloneslave decanter in the
Flesh Markets we just destroyed? I hated that job. I hated what they did. And I hated that they took and then killed my mother, my father and my four sisters!” Matt caught his mental breath. “And I hate that they have cost us the wonderful mind of your bud-off companion! But accepting this alien’s offer of intelligence in return for the survival of its ship is . . . is necessary to avoid the deaths of other living sentients, whether AI or organic. Will you allow me to handle this, my ally?”

BattleMind chomped its toothy jaws tight, then opened them slightly to mind-talk. “It will be as you wish. But observe the surface of the moon behind us. That is the least of what my anger demands in the future!”

Matt’s mind filled with Mata Hari’s sensor vidimage of the surface of the moon Salla.

A giant black crater stretched
seventy kilometers wide where once lay the Anarchate naval base.

“It seems our 42 antimatter beams did not go to waste,” Matt said to the watching minds of his friends, organic and AI. “Though it makes me ill, I will speak with this alien Yorkel.”

High Captain Yorkel listened impassively to the response of this Human Dragoneaux as it told him what his fate and that of his crew would be.

“Yorkel, your offer is accepted. But for my anger at Commander Chai, your ship would have joined the other globeships
on the Spectral Side.” The soft-skinned biped paused, looking around the empty space of its own Bridge. “My allies wish to extinguish you and your ship for your destruction of the artificial intelligence that occupied our ship
Ocean
. I have convinced them to spare your lives. But not your ship. The four hundred and seventy-three lifeforms now aboard your ship
Defiant
will transfer to the six commerce freighters we are bringing over from Megil. After you board them, I care not where you go or what happens to you. But if you seek to attack me again, you will not survive. Do you accept?”

He knew in his double hearts he had no choice. Inhaling through his spiracles, he gave the only answer he could. “
Yes, I accept,” he said in Brokeet click-speech. “Your opponent Commander Chai is currently working for Sector 14 Intelligence near the Crab Nebula of Perseus Arm. At star CC93721. Be warned that there are numerous battleglobes and Offense Remotes mounting guard of that space-borne installation. A visual of the base is attached to my response, along with copies of the few reports from him that are in our CPU. Satisfied?”

“Satisfied,” said the Human. “Your ship
Defiant
will be vaporized in four hours, or after every lifeform has departed, whichever happens first.”

“I have an intelligent CPU onboard, can it—”

“No!” said the Human in high-toned speech that denoted a degree of emotion, based on what little Combat Command’s Compendium of Species had to say about the Human species. “You killed my AI battlemate. Yours will also cease to exist.”

“Understood,” he said, signaling Chief Lark to cut transmission.

At least the Human, who knew enough Brokeet to mention the Spectral Side, had not vaporized them all. For there would be a future battle between him and this Human. Hopefully with a larger fleet at his side. And hopefully without the interference of Commander Chai. Which memory brought an inner glow of humor. Of course he would tachlink dispatch the vidrecord of this battle and his intelligence offer to Chai, with the explanation that now Chai and his superiors knew where the Human would next attack. Sometime in the future. Perhaps the provision of new intelligence on the Human would shield him from Combat Command’s displeasure at his surrender of his battleglobe to an enemy of the Anarchate. He hoped so. For this battle had now become personal.

CHAPTER NINE

Matt walked among the 73 slaver captives that his ships
Flowering
and
Gondu
had rescued from slaver ships in orbit about Megil. The mix of aliens with a few humans had one thing in common—the stench of liquid and solid waste that coated the nearly naked bodies of each captive. It was clear that the genome slaver captains had hoped to sell the captives as labor slaves to the Flesh Markets before they joined the annual slaver rendezvous. He smiled grimly, thinking of his wolf motif on the combat suits belonging to George, Eliana, Suzanne and himself.

Well, his
‘wolf pack’ had made short work of nearly every slaver ship at the deep space rendezvous point. Once more his surviving seven ships were among the five hundred AI-led Dreadnoughts of his Ocean Fleet, as he had announced upon their arrival at the hideaway where they’d left the other ships. Before the two battles. Before the loss of the young-seeming AI Ocean. Well, it was a loss he planned to avoid in the future. Even though psychic precognition had helped him prosecute the war, it had not prevented their loss of a battlemate.

Eliana tugged at his arm. “Matthew, try not to think about it.”

She was with him physically now, while also being in his mind, just as the minds of George and Suzanne were present in their awareness, thanks to their tachlink nodes. And thanks to Mata Hara’s lightspeed neurolinking that connected them all, whether by tachlink or optical fiber cable neck socket. Her mental self felt so deep and so caring. “Thank you, my Eliana. Yes, you share my feelings, my past memories, all that I am. As you have shared the same with me. But I must figure out how to continue this galactic crusade while keeping our losses to a minimum. None, ideally.”

“Nothing is every perfect in this universe
, Matthew. There will be losses,” she said, grimacing. “Unless we stop and disappear into a nearby dwarf galaxy.”

George called from tending to a alien lying on the hall’s floor
. “We
cannot
stop our effort to end cloneslavery, Matthew. Look at these captives! It is enough to empty the stomach of any normal lifeform.”

He and Eliana looked, joined
in slow real-time by George and nearby Suzanne, who was applying a HealPak to a long laceration that scarred the chitin exoskeleton of an ant-like Brokeet alien. The golden-yellow carapace was streaked with white dribbles that might be vomit, while a slightly shorter adult resting beside the wounded Brokeet held a small version of themselves close to her thorax. She held the infant with her middle arm pair while an upper arm reached for a squeeze bottle of water that was being offered by a servebot. Unlike normal Brokeet they said little in click-speech, their mandibles were limp and none of them stood upright on their two hind legs. Still, their yellow eyes followed after the four humans. They like every captive had seen a vidimage from Matt that explained who he was, why he opposed cloneslavery and that each captive would be taken to a safe refuge on a distant planet.