Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3)

by King, T. Jackson

  Eliana foresaw the Anarchate commander’s change of attack long seconds before it happened. Though she was in ocean-time neurolink with Altuna the AI, and in parallel tachlink with Matt and George, it was the IT sharp mind of Suzanne who saw what the Anarchate fleet captain was both doing and intended.

  “He’s trying to flank us by rising above our position!” she mind-yelled to Eliana, then tach-shared the same with the human and T’Chak minds of the other six ships.

  Eliana agreed. “Matt, we need the combined firepower of all eight ships to focus on this fleet! Otherwise it will be able to outmaneuver us. Four of us should fire at where the five battleglobes will be, while the other four aim antimatter barrages at the ten battleglobes rushing toward us!”

  Matt’s mind felt overwhelmed by the inputs from eight T’Chak starships, by the radiation from hundreds of exploded slaver ships, by the death of some of his nanoRemotes and sensorBeads from laser fire or plasma gales, and from the appearance of twenty battleglobes rather than the four he and his friends had expected. It seemed the Anarchate had guessed he would attack the genome slaver ships, or at least the Flesh Markets of Alkalurops. Well, that he would do! After finishing this battle.

  “Do what Eliana said!” he PET mind-imaged to his seven battlemates. With a thought he aimed the three AM cannons of his left wing at a left side battleglobe, and the other three cannons at a central battleglobe. Knowing that it took three AM hits to destroy each twelve-kilometer wide battleglobe, he knew that taking out just two battleglobes was a small result. But if the eight of them each aimed at two battleglobes, then this onrushing fleet of ten battleglobes would become blue-white plasma.

  “Firing the AM cannons, Matthew,” said Mata Hari as BattleMind switched its focus to the Restricted Rooms.

  “Impudent organics!” snarled BattleMind deep in Matt’s mind, the force of its thought-speech-image shaking him to the core. The Sun Glow room emitted a broad white spear of coherent neutrinos that instantly struck a Nova battleglobe in the group of five that sought to outflank them. It became a few whisps of star plasma.

  Matt simultaneously ordered the two kilometer long axial funnel of the plasma cannon to shot a giant ball of purple plasma toward the battleglobe in the five-group that lagged a bit behind, as if it held a commander or Anarchate official. Oh, he hoped this battle would give any Anarchate rulers a lifetime of indigestion!

  Yorkel collapsed onto his stool, his head antennae wilting as the ten-group of battleglobes vanished into blue-white blossoms of matter to energy conversion. His fleet! His beautiful fleet had become . . . just these five remaining battleglobes.

  “Incoming plasma globe!” snarled the Tactical Weapons chief from his post. A hairy Spelidon like his enemy Chai, he knew that Chief Lark would fight tooth, nail and long black whiskers to defeat this invisible enemy that now ravaged his fellows.

  “Moving sideways and to the rear,” said Defiant’s AI as it continued firing dozens of lasers at the locus space that seemed to soak it all up with no result.

  Should he Translate back to base? Stay and die? Come up with a miracle that would destroy all eight opponents?

  “Malel, send an Offense sled against that plasma ball. Maybe a thirty-megaton thermonuclear blast will disrupt it!” he ordered, giving thanks for a small miracle.

  The forward holo blossomed with the death of his near neighbor as a yellow beam of coherent something struck the battleglobe and instantly reduced it to a small ball of stellar plasma. A fourth battleglobe died under the impact of four antimatter beams. Only Defiant and two other battleglobes remained from his wonderful fleet!

  “Enough! We retreat! Back to Megil and the moon base cannons! They will—”

  Matt felt deep satisfaction as the Sun Glow spear of coherent neutrinos reduced one of the five flanking battleglobes to stellar plasma, while concentrated fire from Eliana and Suzanne took out another battleglobe. Leaving just three since his plasma globe had been disrupted by the thermonuke blast of an Offense sled.

  “Matt, they’re leaving!” yelled Eliana in his mind as she sent a tachlink mind image of the three surviving Novas vanishing into Translation.

  “They’re heading for the base at Megil,” cried Suzanne.

  BattleMind snarled like a whirlwind. “After them! After them and I will reduce their star to a ball of collapsed neutrons!”

  “No,” he shouted into the purple thunder cloud that was a very angry BattleMind. “Intelligence first! We can recover data on slaver bases from the wrecks of the slaver ships! Then we go to Megil and destroy the naval base on its moon. Along with the Flesh Markets!”

  In his mind Matt felt the approval of George, Eliana and Suzanne at his mind image of the ancient stone blocks of the Flesh Markets being vaporized by an antimatter beam.

  The giant dragon shape of BattleMind reared back on its hind legs and opened wide its toothy snout. “Always you hold back! Always! We should chase down these fleeing ships and vaporize them once and for all!”

  Mata Hari’s chain mail clad form materialized in Matt’s mind, creating a buffer between him and the rage of BattleMind, who perhaps imitated too well the fury of a living T’Chak. Her human shape transmuted to that of a female T’Chak dragon.

  “Leader of our battle, we have won much!” she cried in ancient T’Chak. “But our organic allies tire from linkage with our minds. We must let them rest. And we must call in the rest of our fleet to join in the attack on Alkalurops!”

  Matt’s mind filled with Mata Hari’s image of five hundred and eight T’Chak dragons filling the space above Megil and its moon naval base. Purple flame shot from their mouths and wing claws crumpled tiny bits of metal that he realized were satellites and shuttle ships which were common above most planets.

  BattleMind looked to the smaller T’Chak dragon of Mata Hari, his large red eyes flaring with deep emotion. In Matt’s mind the dragon of BattleMind reached out one giant wing and sheltered the smaller dragon. “As you wish, young one. We will allow our organics to rest while our Remotes harvest what intelligence may be found in the slaver ships and in the few fragments of battleglobes left from this battle.”

  Matt, Eliana, George and Suzanne all left ocean-time at the same moment, exhaustion filling them even as each knew this battle had just been the first step in erasing cloneslavery from the galaxy. There was more to come. And one did not need to be a psychic to foresee that the path ahead would be stony, sharp and trying.

  Even as he closed his eyes and waited for a drink from a servebot, Matt knew he would never stop trying to achieve an end to cloneslavery and freedom for all bondServants. But this fleet-scale attack by the local Anarchate base told him an ancient tyranny had awakened and now sought his blood.

  Well, he would show them what it meant to wallow in blood. Especially their own blood.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  High Captain Yorkel stood stiffly in his Captain’s Booth as his ship Defiant held orbit directly above Alkalurops naval base on Megil’s moon of Salla, the remaining two battleglobes of his fleet sharing his orbit. All weapons were charged. Minor damage from the slaver rendezvous battle has been repaired. Reloads for his Offense and Defense Remotes, his 30 megaton thermonuclear torps, and thousands of sensorRemotes had been loaded onto his battleglobe. Two Anarchate frigates had sprinkled the space about Megil and its moon with hundreds of tachRemotes so he and his co-commanders would see an enemy lightspeed weapon fire before its impact arrived in their space. There were also scores of x-ray laser Picket Globes filling the space approaches to the planet-moon zone, programmed to fire at the vector of any new gravity wave pulse. The base’s moonside commander had already ordered every commercial ship to stay in Megil orbit upon pain of being vaporized. They did not wish their Picket Globes to discharge at the gravity wave pulse of a departing starship. He tilted his head antennae at Executive Officer Malel.

  “Malel, what does your brain box suggest we will face from this soft-skinned biped?”

  The Orko quad
ruped’s four yellow eyes shifted his way even as its two forearms touched in commands on its WorkPad. “More of the same, my commander. Regrettably. However, with the support of the dozen antimatter cannons at the moon base, combined with our own weaponry, perhaps we can overload the Alcubierre shields of our opponent?”

  Yorkel recalled the Observer Globe vidimage of exactly that happening in an early battle against the single T’Chak Dreadnought of this Human. It had left the alien ship’s nose portion exposed to damage. For just ten femtoseconds. Still, the double thermonuke blast had collapsed the front shield. It was the only battle tactic that had had any effect upon their opponent. He reached to both sides of the booth and tapped their Alert surfaces.

  “Subcommanders and crew! We face a daunting battle when our opponents arrive. But we three Novas are powerful, as are the antimatter cannons on the moon.” He paused as the black furred head of Chief Lark of Tactical Weapons looked back at him, his whiskers and tail held stiff, as if he too hoped for some kind of victory. “We will launch multiple thermonuke torps once we pick up a gravity wave pulse! We plan to overload the Alcubierre defense shield of our opponents and thereby leave them vulnerable to normal weapons fire. When that happens, every laser dome, antimatter cannon and proton beamer crew must fire at that spot! Alert ended!”

  Lark nodded his way, then returned attention to the front holo screen with its tactical icons denoting their three ships, the two Anarchate frigates in polar orbit over the moon Salla, and the 23 commercial starships in orbit about Megil. “Our weapons have been loaded with Friend/Foe identifiers, High Captain,” Lark said.

  Yorkel nodded back, then resumed his stiff stance. The golden gleam of his thorax and abdomen, bearing the embossed symbols of his rank and his membership in Brokeet Clan Night Sky, should serve to encourage the fifteen members of his Bridge crew. They did nothing for his own sense of vulnerability. Especially since he knew the Observer Globe they’d left at the slaver battle site had already tachlink reported its record of the battle to his lifelong enemy Commander Chai. Well, he had some ideas on the mode of proper vengeance for Chai, who’d sent his fleet up against eight Dreadnoughts, versus the single Dreadnought he had been told to expect. And Chai would not like any of those ideas.

  Matt and his seven Dreadnoughts materialized in space behind the local moon of Megil planet, but close to it since he hoped to use the moon’s mass to block any automatic laser or antimatter fire at them upon detection of their gravity wave pulses as they exited Translation. Swimming in ocean-time with Eliana, George, Suzanne, Mata Hari, BattleMind and the four ship AIs of Flowering, Ocean, BattleMate and Gondu, he heard Suzanne’s psychic warning.

  “Shields up! Matt, there are x-ray Picket Globes out here that are already firing in our direction!”

  The flat Alcubierre space-time fields snapped into existence on the top, bottom, both sides, tail and nose ends of starship Mata Hari, as they did on each of his seven battlemates. His ship senses saw the streak of coherent x-rays that came from a globe’s self-destruction in a thermonuclear blast in order to send a beam of x-rays in a particular direction. The collimating tube that aimed the x-rays also disappeared in the thermonuke blast, but it stayed whole long enough to guide a portion of the x-rays toward a target. He winced mentally as twelve Picket Globes shot x-ray beams at his eight ships. Fortunately they arrived long nanoseconds after they’d raised shields. Still, it was a sign that the commander of the three battleglobes which had escaped was someone who thought about all options for defense. He would keep that in mind.

  “Matt,” said Eliana in his mind as her image sat naked in her own Interlock Pit. “Suzanne and I, we see that the battleglobes are opposite us, hanging above the moon’s naval base.”

  “Two armed frigates in polar orbit!” cried the AI mind of Gondu.

  Each of them saw the T’Chak’s sensory image of the frigates, which were armed with proton beamers and multiple lasers. They gleamed in x-ray and ultraviolet light since both were on the night side of the tidally locked moon. Matt PET thought a command to George.

  “Take them out please.”

  The two frigates turned to blue-white vapor as neutron antimatter beams hit them. An action that surely would be reported to the alien globeship commander since several small comlink satellites orbited this moon.

  Sensing his concern Mata Hari ordered the spinal laser domes to vaporize those comsats. “Matthew, the space around here is littered with tachRemotes that are reporting our actions instantly to the alien commander. There are likely a few Offense sleds sitting silent until we approach within their range. And perhaps other surprises since they have had a day within which to prepare a defense.”

  Matt was thankful for the mental ‘thumbs-up’ sent to him by his organic and even his AI battlemates. Everyone knew he, George, Suzanne and Eliana needed a rest before again entering ocean-time for the next stage of the battle of Alkalurops. And his decision to signal the rest of the fleet to remain hidden two light years away in deep space was accepted by BattleMind once he’d explained the value of an enemy underestimating an opponent’s strength. It was an ancient human tactic known since the time of Sun Tzu.

  Well, at least they’d avoided giving the battleglobes an easy antimatter shot by arriving with the moon’s mass between them and the Anarchate ships. Perhaps the gravity wave quakes of their materialization so far into the star system would unsettle the moon’s naval base. Hmmm. That gave him an idea.

  “Friends, let us re-enter Translation briefly. We will materialize on the far side of Megil so the planet lies between us and this moon. I’d like to see the Anarchate commander shoot through the planet!”

  Mental cheers greeted his change to the plan they’d all discussed. Suzanne and Eliana did not raise any precognitive objections. And George’s mindflow said he greatly enjoyed doing the unexpected.

  So be it. He gave the mental command and normal existence disappeared.

  Yorkel watched the holo’s imagery of the brief battle between the eight arriving T’Chak starships and the twelve Picket Globes that had engaged them. Disappointment filled him at the speed with which the enemy starships raised their Alcubierre shields. Still, it said the T’Chak craft were vulnerable to normal weaponry—if it could ever arrive on target.

  “Malel, have the polar frigates try to ram the—”

  “Gone, High Captain!” the Orko exclaimed as it fell back on its rear pair of legs. “One enemy starship vaporized them with two antimatter blasts. And . . . our tachRemotes show the eight ships have re-entered Translation. To where we do not yet know.”

  High Captain Yorkel gave credit to the Human Dragoneaux for choosing to exit Translation with the moon lying between his battleglobes and their ships. And those ships, in the brief real time image they’d seen before the Alcubierre screens went up, resembled a space-going version of a T’Chak alien, with the black wings, red eyes and long tail that matched the vidimages from more than two hundred millennia ago. Why the Human had chosen ships that looked like that, when early reports of his ship showed it possessing the standard central tube with outrigger pontoons for its two antimatter cannons, escaped him. He had seen with his own eyes the current appearance of this Human’s ship. Was his ship, and the other T’Chak Dreadnoughts, able to change body shape? If so, if the ships were made from a flexible hull material, then this opponent could imitate the look of most any starship belonging to an Anarchate species. Clenching his feet claws, Yorkel gave orders.

  “Wherever they next appear we will attack! If the gravity wave pulses are on an open vector line, fire along that line! If elsewhere, dispatch some of our thermonuke Offense sleds. And keep your eyes or perceptor stalks focused on the vidimages from our tachRemotes!”

  In front of him the Bridge crew fell to their duties, Malel and Tactical Weapons Chief Lark first among them. As they should be. If they could not out-think and out-fight this renegade Human, their ancestors might soon have company on the Spectral Side.

  Geo
rge’s mindsense took in the space on the daylight side of Megil as his ship Inevitable and his seven battlemates blossomed into existence upon exit from Translation. Each of them immediately raised Alcubierre space-time shields in view of the Picket Globe attack from the back side of the local moon. This time only three Picket Globes were in range to explode and pelt his, Suzanne’s and Gondu’s ships with coherent x-rays. No one was harmed. But the tachRemote he had ejected before raising shields reported plenty of comsats in orbit about the planet, along with several tachRemotes so close he could have physically swatted them. If he’d been foolish enough to stay in normal space mode. He recalled Matt’s memory of the attack on starship Mata Hari as it left Hagonar Station with Eliana at the start of Matt’s crusade to defeat the Halicene strip-mining of her home planet. The impact of lasers on the ship had felt like the sting of wasps. He had no desire to experience directly such an attack on the physical body of his ship.

  “Neither do I,” murmured Inevitable in her feminine voice, dropping her green mindglow to appear as a blond-haired copy of Suzanne. “Our Translation this close to the planet has caused multiple earthquakes but no tsunamis. The planet is still stable in its orbit. But several comsats are falling from orbit.”

  A result he gave thanks for. The billion members of the Teecheen species who had evolved on this planet might be the hosts to the horror of the Flesh Markets, but he would not blame every Teecheen for a political decision made millennia ago. His work at the Omega Casino had exposed him often to the CEO mentality of alien and human Owners. Workers to them were replaceable subjects who did what they were told, or else. And the bondServant contracts held few protections for workers, other than the right to food, air, safety and shelter. Beyond that, the Anarchate rule was to be useful or be gone. That said, he looked forward to the destruction of any Anarchate installation in addition to the vaporization of the Flesh Markets.