Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3)
Page 5
With a wave of his finger-claws he reset the holo to show the green-speckled track of the Human’s attacks so far. With a tilt of his head he recalled their names once more.
Sigma Puppis B system of the Direndl. SAO 47250 of the outlying Intelligence Dome where its non-AI occupants had revived after the departure of the Mata Hari starship. Next came Zeta Serpentis, home to the now destroyed Omega Casino, and former workplace of this Dragoneaux creature. CC41324 in the Keyhole Nebula, home to a naval shipyard that had been destroyed, even though its thousands of workers had been allowed to live. And thereby spread seditious word of this Vigilante who challenged the Anarchate. Next came CC1939 in the Omega Centauri star cluster, deep within the Norma Arm of the galaxy. A Meligun merchant had alerted a nearby Combat Command base of the arrival in-system of the Human’s starship, which sought fuel and supplies. Regrettably, the local merchant fleet had been unable to delay the Human, while the battleglobes sent to capture him had been defeated. As shown by the Observer Globe they’d left at the outer system upon arrival. Again per his order. Then came the disaster of Megadeen, a galactic communications sector node that orbited CC4137 in Norma Arm. Not only had the Human destroyed the multiple guarding starships that had circled the methane-clouded moon of Megadeen, but it had also defeated four battleglobes! And now, Belizel months later, it had defeated the three battleglobes he’d sent to the distant small galaxy that research showed was the home system of the long-dead T’Chak species.
“Commander Chai?” called Kontine, his Loglan chief assistant.
He sat back from his intense focus on the green-speckled track of his Human adversary. “Yes?” he said, keeping his gaze on the holo as he desperately wondered what he and Combat Command could due in the three point five months that remained before his adversary returned to ravage Anarchate bases and shipyards.
“High Commander Brrzeet has called for your . . . attendance before him. Immediately, the signal indicates.”
Kontine’s click voice carried no emotional tone of reaction to what it knew as well as his other assistants was an Explain-or-Die appearance before the Intelligence High Commander. Well, he was able to think on his two feet even if his whiskers and tail betrayed his nervous worry.
A Plan he must present, since it was clear his boss had just reviewed the tachlink record of the disaster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. He would come up with something. He and his Spelidon brothers always came up with a promising plan. That was why his species made up the majority of sentients now serving in Combat Command. While they had evolved to be excellent one-on-one fighters, their minds were even better at tactical and strategic planning. Their 57 colony worlds required excellent administration. And planning. Now, he must come up with a combat Plan for defeating a ghost-like bipedal alien with only a single starship, while his fellows commanded multiple fleets. That was it! If they could respond quickly enough with a small fleet of battleglobes, they could surround this alien starship and fire enough beams until one antimatter beam slithered through its overlapping Alcubierre space-time shields. It was a gamble, of course. But better to lose the lives of others than his own life!
Matt sat in the Interlock Pit of an alien starship like an olive in a martini glass, naked as the day he’d been born. The recent discussion with Eliana and Suzanne had been unsettling. It was clear he and George could no longer treat the two women as beloved “subjects” to be protected from all harm. Now, they insisted on going into harm’s way! Although each would have the aid of a T’Chak self-aware computer mind in a two-kilometer long Dreadnought-class starship. A starship capable of changing its outer body shape from a central tube with two outrigger pontoons, to a dragon-like shape that resembled BattleMind to an unnerving degree. But could they feel comfortable doing what he did now?
His bare skin soaked in thousands of lightbeam inputs that talked to his skin, inputs that came from the control devices that lined the cone-shaped Interlock Pit. Light moved so much faster than electrons-down-a-nerve, and the beams caressed every inch of his body. Touching here. Touching there. Whispering. Cajoling. Making direct contact with electrochemical receptors, firing down nerve fiber pathways, filling him with, with . . . .
Ecstasy could not begin to match it.
He’d called it ocean-time the first time he’d gone on-line with the feminine Mata Hari mind persona. She had first appeared as the mind image of a late Victorian-dressed, amber-skinned young woman with long black hair piled atop her head. And the AI had no special phrase for what she and Matt did—lightspeed neurolinking was simply how she thought, lived, felt and ran the mech-tech construct called a starship. In-link with Mata Hari was more than the out loud talking used by organic beings. It felt like a continuous electrocution, but one which did not burn him out. Together they were the symbiosis
Then again, Eliana had had her first experience of ocean-time when she piggy-back rode on the red cloud mind of Mata Hari as his AI partner had lightspeed linked into his mind. Mata Hari had appeared during the worst of his mind-to-mind encounter with Eternal Love of the Lacunae Mindworks. Perhaps her buffering had saved his sanity. But by being there, Eliana had experienced lightspeed thinking and the exhaustion it always brought him. She had been exposed to his deep memories even more than through the memory crystal record he had shared with her that showed his family when it had been whole, before the genome slavers captured his Mom, Dad and four sisters. What did she think of the hard knocks schooling he’d undergone as a stevedore on a freighter, then later a Protector for rich alien Owners?
He shrugged mentally, turning his attention to the forward holoscreen that depicted the deep black space of Lacunae’s outer star system. They and their convoy of interlinked T’Chak starships were heading for the heliopause of this system. That was the normal place at which a starship would appear from FTL Translation, or enter Translation on a trip to elsewhere, with the least chance of gravity tides harming local planets or intersecting an asteroid.
“Hello Matthew,” said the mindvoice of Mata Hari, the AI who ‘loved’ him in a way different from the organic love of Eliana. “Are you feeling more settled? Did the sleep refresh you? And—”
“You conspirator, you!”
The Spy image of Mata Hari in his mind changed instantly from the Victorian dress of the World War I French spy to a naked Barbarian Queen dressed solely in necklaces, jewelry and bracelets, thence to the ferocious Lady of the Sword whose silvery chain mail cloak flowed into a bronze-studded leather skirt, her two-handed steel sword lying against one shoulder, then finally to her Summer Girl look of Morrigan planet, where she’d danced over the meadow with black tresses flying as sunlight glowed on her amber face, full of joy and happiness and hope. His partner of seven years stopped her Summer Girl dancing and stared directly at his mind, her dark eyes filled with a look unique to an AI. “Which conspirator image do you prefer, dear Matthew?”
He sighed mentally. “All of them, of course. Just as you have come to . . . love me, I have come to cherish you, dear lady of my mind.”
Summer Girl smiled a shy smile, her persona mood shifting lightspeed to one of amiableness. “Well, I confess. Yes, I am a conspirator in league with your females. They are impressive minds, especially that Suzanne. Her software algorithm allows me and BattleMind to mentally tachlink with each newly awakened shipmind.” Mata Hari raised a slim hand to brush back her thick mane of charcoal black hair. “And your Eliana, well, her Molecular Geneticist mind is also formidable. She handled the transition to millisecond thinking very well, for a first time. Her voice was what pulled you back from the vortex of Eternal Love’s disordered thoughts.”
So. He had survived his gamble thanks to two females. The mind-buffering of Mata Hari combined with the heart-tug of Eliana’s musical voice. Well, the hunch had paid off with the return to sanity of the ancient Mother of Mind
s of the T’Chak. And with the gaining of 507 additional T’Chak Dreadnought warships. Which reminded him of something else shared by Eternal Love.
“Thank you, Mata Hari. For your help then. For your help and love since you salvaged my Stasis lifepod seven years ago. And for your future help in running our new fleet.” Matt spoke mentally in slow human mode, since they were not in combat nor about to enter Translation. But this mind-to-mind linking was private, solely him and Mata Hari. At least until Eliana, Suzanne and George occupied their own Interlock Pits on three ships of the fleet. “So tell me what you conspirators achieved besides the interlinkage of 508 starships, counting you and BattleMind?”
In his mind Mata Hari’s image switched to one of a naked woman sitting in a replica of an Interlock Pit, her black skin and looks resembling that of the Barbarian Queen. But this image held the face of Mata Hari and her deeply intent eyes. “Well, we followed the human example and created a hierarchy of control.”
A hierarchy? How could a hierarchy apply to AI minds who resided in molecular memory crystals that used quantum fluctuations to think faster than any organic could think? “This should be interesting. What kind of hierarchy did you create? And why?”
Mata Hari waved at the mental holosphere, a replica of the one that his open eyes also saw on a Bridge where George was now showing Eliana and Suzanne the innards of his combat suit, explaining how everything worked and how much “fun” it was to run or fly faster than anything living. “See the hexagonal arrangement of blue dots? They represent individual ships. Each with its own mind-name, as the Belizel script under each dot indicates.” In his mind Matt saw the Belizel script change into English. “We three, we decided to appoint ten ship minds as battalion commanders. Each commander downlinks our tachlinked instructions to fifty ships. Each member of a fifty-ship cohort communicates among its flight members, sharing experiences from the past, visiting, discovering which cohort members are male, female or neuter T’Chak personas, and processing the seven years of my experience with you, Matthew, as a combined Human/AI entity.”
Ahhh. That made sense. While Mata Hari and BattleMind handled thousands of inputs and outputs every millisecond, appointing ten chief assistants would reduce the real time distraction of commanding 507 starships that were newly awakened. And still shocked by the demise of most T’Chak Masters. Each Cohort Commander could gather their fifty ships into a time-synced unit for Translation, with a nearly simultaneous exit from Translation for the future refuelings they would all have to do as they traveled along the Magellanic Stream of gases back to the Milky Way. “But Mata Hari, that leaves seven ships with no cohort commander. Or am I wrong?”
“Just not yet informed,” she said with a smile as her naked form reached out to touch a Command/Control/Communication stud on the wall of her mental Interlock Pit. A text image appeared next to the holo pattern of the ship hexagon. “These seven ships are under the direct control of myself and BattleMind. They do what we do. They move where we move. They hear my voice just as much as you hear it. Their flexhulls change into a T’Chak dragon shape when our ship does so. Which, of course, is also what the other 500 Dreadnoughts do by way of the interlinkage with their Cohort Commanders. You like?”
Matt saw that his small cohort of eight ships, counting Mata Hari, lay at the center of the hexagon, arranged in a ring that mirrored the sides of the hexagon’s outer ring. He smiled. “I like. A lot. With this delegation of control to ten Cohort Commanders we retain the ability to have ten battle groups that can move differently in three dimensions, while also obeying any combat orders given by myself, you or BattleMind. Uh, what are the name sigils of the Cohort Commanders?”
In his mind the naked Mata Hari touched another stud, then waved at the mental holo. “Here are the ships and their names, Matthew. Long ago they named themselves as Perfect, Torsion, Defiance, Melody, Slith, Nova, Immovable, Diamond, Imperial and Destruction.”
Matt stared at shapes that varied from the long crocodile snout and tail, with armored spine and black wings similar to the shape now shown by Mata Hari, to a silvery tube with four outrigger pontoons that each carried an antimatter cannon, to a thick pillar with embedded AM pontoons, to smaller dragon images. “Are the smaller shaped ships the female T’Chak personas?”
“Yes,” said the naked Mata Hari as she stepped out of the mental Interlock Pit, stood facing him naked, then reappeared as the happy Summer Girl of Morrigan. “Did we conspire well?”
He had to hand it to Mata Hari, Eliana and Suzanne the IT Queen. They had anticipated his needs as central commander of the anti-cloneslavery fleet, and even now he could hear the distant whispers of Cohort Commanders interlinking with their fifty cohort members, the electronic noise of their instantaneous tachlink chatter a matter that could overwhelm him if he concentrated on it. He did not. Instead, he thought ahead to their upcoming trip back through the Large Magellanic Cloud, their frequent stops for fuel gases every 10,000 light years, and their joint arrival at the point where the Magellanic Stream passed close to the star cluster occupied by the Bogean Harmony. Those aliens had promised to deliver a Dark Energy FTL engine and a Stasis Projector when they returned. Their payment for a copy of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Alien minds were indeed alien.
“Yes, Mata Hari, you and Eliana and Suzanne conspired well. Can you do equally well in creating full-powered combat suits for the women, in training them for suit combat in our armory chamber, and in training them and George for lightspeed neurolinking when they occupy their own Interlock Pits?”
Mata Hari’s Summer Girl image nodded slowly. “Yes. Probably. How soon do they need to be ready to pilot one of my sibling Dreadnoughts?”
“By the time we reach the Bogean Harmony space. It will then be a single long Translation jump to reach the space controlled by the Anarchate.” Matt paused, sending his ally a mind image of the future. “I have plans for the upcoming meeting of genome slavery starships at Alkalurops system. You approve?”
Mata Hari squinted, as if peering at a vidimage, when in truth his mind image was as clear to her as any mind image she sent him via the Positron Emission Tomography Squids that were embedded just under his scalp. “It can be done, Matthew. Your women are fast learners. As is George. We will be ready for the Anarchate. All of us.”
He believed her.
Blinking, Matt refocused on the forward holo image of black space sprinkled with orange, yellow, pink, red and golden jewels that marked the diverse stars of the Small Magellanic Cloud. Beginning now, they had a journey of 190,000 light years to make. A journey they had made before, albeit with a few surprises along the way. Hopefully, their return as a fleet of T’Chak Dreadnought starships would be an unexpected surprise for the leaders of Combat Command. Who no doubt had plenty of records of his battles with Anarchate battleglobes. But they had no way of reading his mind. And he liked being a sneaky human with the power to cause havoc among those who ruled home galaxy.
CHAPTER FIVE
George sat naked in the Interlock Pit of Inevitable, the T’Chak starship he’d transferred to several stops back. He missed the blond curls and brown freckles of Suzanne. She had sworn to be his lifemate. As he had promised her the same. But now she piloted her own T’Chak Dreadnought, the starship Lorelei. As did Eliana aboard the Altuna. They were three of the inner ring of eight T’Chak starships, including Matt’s Mata Hari, that now lay next to the Magellanic Stream, not far from where they’d met the Bogean Harmony starship that resembled two pyramids joined at the base. Nearby glimmered the golden metal of two gifts left behind by the Bogeans. A gift it was up to Matt to claim.
“We could pick up the Bogean gifts, George,” said the soft voice of Inevitable, who carried the persona of a female T’Chak.
While his ears heard her voice, George felt her impatience to do something as it filtered into his mind over the fiber optic cable that was socketed into his neck. He gave her a mental smile. “We could pick it up since BattleMind shared with you the Bogean c
ode that signals Friend. But the Bogeans knew only Matt’s ship, Mata Hari. I suspect those two tech gifts are tuned to only his ship’s EMF signature. Anyway, it would be impolite.”
“Impolite?” said a green mindglow that represented Inevitable’s courteous but unyielding persona.
Avoiding ocean-time linkage since the eight of them were awaiting the arrival of the other five hundred T’Chak starships, George PET thought-imaged him and Matt in combat suits as they covered each other during the attack on the genome slaver pirate ship. “Matt trusts me. I trust Matt. Equally vital, we have shared thoughts during his training of me, Eliana and Suzanne on how to handle optical neurolinking. He leads. We support. Doing otherwise would be impolite.”
The green mindglow transitioned to the shape of a dragon-like T’Chak, a dragon whose black wings and toothy snout were slightly smaller than the twelve-foot height of BattleMind. In his mind she spread her wings, curled her wing claws and glanced around the darkness of intergalactic space as if anxious. “But it is boring to wait here, doing nothing. After my long sleep I ache for action. For doing complex work. For—”
“Soon,” George interrupted, mindimaging the genome slaver ship that had attacked the Irish settled planet of Morrigan. “Once we arrive back in Milky Way galaxy we will attend the annual meeting of many ships like this one. According to what Matt has shared with me. There will be destruction aplenty, and the need for the eight of us to act in tight coordination.” He mind imaged the dragon shapes of the other seven Dreadnoughts that were led directly by Matt and Mata Hari. “Think you can work with these other Dreadnoughts, as guided by Matt, Mata Hari and BattleMind?”