Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) (29 page)

“Matthew! Are you going to kill everyone on the planet?” called his Mom from the accel-couch behind him.

Mata Hari took holo shape beside the giant black dragon of BattleMind, this time resembling a smaller female T’Chak dragon. She reached out with one wingtip to touch the larger wing of the truly alien AI of BattleMind. “Elder, not this time. There are millions of Spelidon and other species not involved in the Flesh Markets of this planet. Matt will be more selective in his destruction.”

“Exactly,” Eliana said
from behind Matt. “Mother Kristen, we try to leave normal people unharmed by our attacks against the Anarchate. We only demolish a planet if it has just Anarchate personnel on it. And then only if it is relatively lifeless.”

“Oh,” murmured his mother. “Glad to hear that. Sorry, Matt
hew, for talking like a Mom.”

Matt
smiled to himself. The days he had spent with Eliana, his Mom and his sister Charlotte had been priceless. He had shed tears as he heard the details of their lives in labor slavery. They had cried too when he hooked them into a neurolink device and shared his memories of being a cloneslave decanter at the Flesh Markets of Alkalurops. Good Eliana had brought them all glasses of golden Morrigan wine to share and that had helped each of them cope with the horrors of existence in the Anarchate. But now, after a week spent traveling the 2,100 light years from Thuringia inward to Sagittarius Arm and the M2-9 Nebula, it was time for him, Eliana and the other seven warships of Hexagon Prime fleet to do the work he’d sworn to do when he’d declared war on the Anarchate.

“Matthew,” called Charlotte in her soft contralto voice from her accel-couch next to the Memory Pillars that contained the mind of Mata Hari. “Is there more than one Flesh Market on this world? And what about any captives who have been sold into labor slavery, like me and Mom? Will you rescue them?”

He bit his lip, accepted the mental hug he got from both Mata Hari and Eliana over their tachlink connections, and said what had to be said. “No, Charlotte, I will not try to rescue labor slaves on planet three of M2-9. Our fleet must move quickly from star to star, in a series of Hit-and-Run attacks on Anarchate installations. They are the true enemy. But I will leave a ComRemote in orbit advising the Spelidon people to free their labor slaves and give them a free trip to their homeworld if demanded. I will show a vid image of the way we vaporized the slaver asteroid as a suggestion that the same could befall them if they do not release the labor slaves.”

“Oh.” Matt turned in his Interlock Pit chair and looked across the flexmetal floor of the Bridge to where his sister reclined in her accel-couch. Her red hair had been pulled back into a ponytail. Her cheeks showed a touch of pale pink makeup from Eliana’s stash.
And her thoughtful look fixed on him. “But you won’t return here, will you?”

“No.” To his right his Mom and Eliana turned to watch him and Charlotte. “I cannot do the predictable. I cannot be seen on other human colony worlds.
” He hoped his sister understood what it meant to lead a war campaign, versus acting like a small-time conspirator. “And I have to trust that our agitprop vidcasts on the galactic tachnet have gotten people of all species thinking about how corrupt the Anarchate and its officials really are. And how they work hand in pincer with genome harvesters to harm new colony worlds. While ignoring the planetary damage caused by the galactic conglomerates, like what Halicene tried to do on Eliana’s world.”

Charlotte blinked, then nodded slowly. “The big picture. Or, the Big Time as your battlemate George has said during our holo picnics in the Park!” She smiled at him.

Matt let go his pent-up breath. He so wanted his Mom and his sister to understand him, to understand what he did now and why. “Thank you, good sister. Uh, what do you think you will do with your life when we get to Morrigan?”

Charlotte gave him a grin that reminded him of the times they had played poker and she had beaten him
five out of seven games. “Well, I could look for romance and a possible husband.” Their mother Kristen beamed happily. “But having watched the sneaky machinations of my Meligun master as he circumvented the formal Anarchate banking rules to move money and assets from one star to another, I think I
like
committing covert action. For a good cause.”

“Oh?” Matt wondered why she had paused. Then he understood. “Okay, I’m game.
What kind of covert action?”

Charlotte waved one hand over the armrest of the accel-couch, activating its holo function. Between her and Matt there floated a three dee image of his
Dreadnought
Mata Hari
. She grinned big. “I want one of those! Love those batwings, long tail and sharp teeth!”

BattleMind, who had been attending the conversations with a small part of his voluminous mind, gave a snort that echoed loudly in Matt’s mind and in his real-time ears. “Female Human, this ship portrays my shape because we were both built by our perfect masters. Therefore our shape is perfect. So of course a flawed organic such as yourself would be envious of my form.”

An amused glow filled Charlotte’s face as she pointed at the small floating starship. “I want one of those! Can you have one waiting for me when we arrive at Morrigan? Dear brother?”

Matt snorted and turned back to face the forward holosphere. “
If you wish to become a pilot in my fleet, you must train for it. Also, you will allow cyborg modifications to your body that other humans do not approve of. Ask Eliana about what it’s like being a cyborg. And how folks on her world viewed human cyborgs.”

“I will! Thank you Matt!”

What had he done to warrant thanks? He blinked. Realized his sister was better at word entrapments than he had ever been, felt indigestion begin to arise from his stomach, mentally told his nanoDocs to shut down the acid flow, and intentionally, with great focus, chose to put emotions aside in favor of taking all eight ships into combat in a star system they had never visited.

“George, Sarah, Rafael,
Toktaleen, Ben, Suzanne, Eliana, Mata Hari and Altuna, we enter Translation in two seconds,” he said aloud and also in his mind in anticipation of entering
ocean-time
mind communion. “Our emergence point will be four light seconds out from planet three, on a vector that parallels its equator, headed outward toward the heliopause of the two binary stars at the nebula core.” His fellow pilots gave him mental nods as they bent to working with their own ship AIs. “Mom and Charlotte, you will see what happens during our strike on the front holosphere. Eliana, however, will be in computer speed neurolink with me, Mata Hari and BattleMind as we work the systems of this Dreadnought to the maximum. Please do not disturb us until you hear me speak like I am speaking now.”

Matt ignored the acknowledgments of his family, welcomed Eliana into their fleet mind communion
with a promise she could return to
Altuna
once this attack was done, then felt his senses expand as they all entered
ocean-time
. He felt the ship the way they would their clothes, and saw the many different energy emissions that filled normal space-time. Streaks of white, purple, yellow and red criss-crossed the space in which they floated, just two light years out from the Spelidon planet.

“Translating!” called Mata Hari.

Greyness filled Matt’s mental vision and began to cross to his eyes at lightspeed. He did not see the holosphere image break down but he did notice a kind of ripple to the vision space between him and the holo.

Fourteen
milliseconds, 132 nanoseconds, 98 picoseconds and 33 femtoseconds
, said his cyborg cyberclock as it kept track of real-time that had passed since he’d entered
ocean-time
.

The exit from Translation into normal space-time came as a shock
to Matt.

Mata Hari’s
multi-spectrum and multi-wavelength sensors showed large and small emission starbursts. White stellar neutrinos, orange graviton waves from the star and nearby planet, green microwaves, and purple ultraviolet streaks filled his mind’s-eye view of a star system that shot UV-heated particles into polar jets rather than along the ecliptic plane of the three planets that orbited the two central stars. Fortunately, all eight ships were ‘looking away’ from the bright binaries of CC8712 and toward the three rocky planets, with planet three nearing at a fast pace. Activating the charge-coupled photon chips of his ship scope, Matt’s vision zoomed in on the planet and its near orbital space.

A small Commerce Station orbited just 300 kilometers above a planet that was the size of Venus, though its oxy-nitro atmosphere was a mix of white and grey clouds sparkling with lightning strikes at high altitudes. Fourteen ships lay nose-in or close to the station. Two of the ships were armed Corvettes that likely belonged to the Spelidon planetary government. Lying closer to Matt’s fleet were two battleglobes
that occupied the space between the airless planet two and the occupied planet three.

Fourteen
milliseconds, 411 nanoseconds, 32 picoseconds and 24 femtoseconds
, said his cyborg time tracker.

His space image
greyed out briefly as the Alcubierre shields popped into existence around his ship and the other seven that were circling in the Hub-and-Wheel configuration pioneered by Suzanne and Eliana. It was the smartest way to avoid attacks by Thermonuke sleds and Assault Asteroids that tried  to Translate into the hub ship’s normal space-time. The mental imagery returned, thanks to the scores of nanoRemotes, tachRemotes, sensorBeads, Seek-Identify balls and the ComRemote that would eventually assume an elliptical orbit about the planet known as New Life.

Blue-white thermonuclear explosions occurred ahead and to the right of the fleet as a dozen Picket Globes blew up and shot coherent x-rays toward their gravity pulse track.

“Rising off the arrival vector,” said Mata Hari as the other seven ships did likewise, with some moving sideways even as they stayed in the Hub-and-Wheel configuration.

Three spots far ahead of them suddenly glowed deep red as deut-li fusion pulse
stardrives lit up and began to push something toward them at one-fourth lightspeed.

“Thermonuke sleds ahead!” cried Mata Hari in his mind even as the AIs of other ships said the same thing to their pilots.

A Mata Hari dressed in chainmail and leather skirt with an outstretched sword pointed the sword tip toward the oncoming thermonukes. Red laser beams from the two ‘eye’ emitters of
Mata Hari
sped outward fast as light. In a second they impacted on two of the three sleds. The targeted sleds blew apart. The third sled was killed by a pink proton beam fired by Ben the Aussie, who occupied the upper left spot in the rotating wheel of other T’Chak ships.

Seven hundred twelve
milliseconds, 213 nanoseconds, 421 picoseconds and 96 femtoseconds
, said his cyborg time tracker.

Near the distant planet, two of the ships lying near the Commerce Station suddenly disappeared into Translation.

“Antimatter Supply Tubes!” Suzanne yelled into their mind communion. “Aimed at Matt and at Sarah! Jink sideways a thousand kilometers. The rest of us can take them out with our lasers.”

Matt did as instructed by Suzanne, giving thanks for her ability to use psychic precognition to ‘see’ the future from minutes ahead to months down the time line. Sarah moved too, flipping her bat-winged dragon onto its side so her own deut-li stardrive could push her off trajectory faster than the
oncoming Supply Tubes could predict.

Green and purple laser beams shot at the spots where the Supply Tubes emerged from Translation. Four of the nine beams made direct contact. Which was all that was needed to cause the magfield containment of the antimatter to vanish. The antimatter within the ships sufficed to vaporize their transport.

Nine hundred seventy-eight milliseconds, 932 nanoseconds, 765 picoseconds and 22 femtoseconds
, said his cyberclock.

Matt saw all this through his mental periphery as the approached within a light second of the two battleglobes. Dozens of spots on each globe sparkled as
weapons domes emitted lasers of various frequencies and source, all aimed at his eight ships. At the north and south poles of each battleglobe, the AM projectors shot black beams of coherent neutron antimatter at Matt’s ships. The eight black beams hit the Alcubierre shields of ships piloted by Matt, George and Rafael, only to be Translated to Elsewhere-Elsewhen.

“Firing!” screamed the hurricane mind of BattleMind as it unleashed six antimatter beams from its two dragon wings.

Matt winced from the pain of BattleMind’s powerful mind. Mata Hari quickly inserted her mind between Matt’s and the giant dragon to serve as a buffer. “Sorry Matt. Should have done that sooner!”

He focused briefly on the two battleglobes as 48 antimatter beams impacted on the two giant globes. Since it normally took only three AM beam impacts to crack the interior of a battleglobe and thereby unleash antimatter reservoirs and fusion power plant magfields, the impact of a barrage that put twenty-four AM beams into each battleglobe was an instant glow of blue-white matter-to-energy conversion as
the steel, ablative armor, food, water and more than four hundred lifeforms became charged gases that ballooned out from the spot where formerly a solid object had existed.