Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3)

by King, T. Jackson

  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.

  Suzanne moved her attention from the HealPak to him and Eliana. “Matt, as best I can compute with Mata Hari’s reference to the Compendium of Species, we have forty-seven adults, twelve teens and fourteen infants or toddlers. Depending on how the species labels such things.”

  Mata Hari appeared in full-size holo, wearing her Summer Girl persona with loose black hair, pale skin, a necklace of amber stones and an embroidered dress patterned after one of Suzanne’s designs. Her look was serious. “The lifeforms here represent the Mican, Spelidon, Brokeet, Dolmat, Loglan, Hootnai and Malidon species. Plus two families of Humans. Those able to talk have expressed thanks for their rescue.”

  “Will they all survive?” asked Eliana.

  Mata Hari’s sober look moved to a smile. “Yes, I believe so. There are three lifeforms under intensive treatment in the Biolab, but everyone else is here. Shall I assign them separate roomsuites?”

  “Yes,” Matt said, his sadness over the loss of Ocean being replaced by grim relief at the number of captives they had rescued. “Set things up like we did for the Morrigan captives and the Omega Casino refugees. A large community hall with Food Alcove. Access along the Spine hallway to the hall, their roomsuites and to the Park at the end of the Spine is permitted. No one may travel anywhere else. Including the Bridge, the cargohold and the Restricted Rooms.”

  “Of course, Matthew,” she said, her cottony summer dress fluttering in a holo wind.

  George looked to them as he stood up from bandaging an alien, his usual shyness abandoned. “I will talk to the two human families, see how they are doing, learn if they lost family members during their capture.”

  “Find out their planet of origin,” called Suzanne as she finished her HealPak work on the Brokeet male, motioning to a rat-like Spelidon whose mouth whiskers were bent and whose tail had been partly amputated to come forward. “Maybe we can return them there. Or maybe they will like settling on Morrigan when we arrive there.”

  Although Suzanne and George were each doing something to help the wounded, sick and exhausted captives, they looked at him when Eliana asked the obvious question.

  “What next, Matthew? Another battle? Do we go after this Commander Chai from your battle to rescue my home planet?”

  Matt thought of the books on tactics and asymmetric warfare he had read. He considered the records of planet and space battles that were on the galactic tachnet archive for anyone with the time to review them. He could not help but return to the approach of the Han Chinese military leader Sun Tzu.

  “No, we will not attack this Chai at his base in the Crab Nebula. Nor will we head to a place associated with my past battles, like the Halicene shipyard at Upsilon Carinae. We stay away from our home planets for now as those are too obvious,” he said, turning with Eliana to head for the slidedoor exit to the Spine hallway. “We will head some place they cannot predict nor expect us to appear.”

  “Where?” asked Eliana as the two of them left their friends as they resumed work among the captives.

  “The star 18 Scorpii in the Scorpius Constellation.”

  “Why there?”

  Matt smiled live-mode at her as they turned and walked down the Spine, heading for their personal roomsuite. They planned to celebrate being back together after long months apart during the return from the Small Magellanic Cloud. Their partners George and Suzanne planned a similar personal rendezvous. But they had all agreed on a picnic celebration in the Park area maintained by Gatekeeper, before each of them left to take command of their personal Dreadnought.

  “You are beautiful, you know.”

  Eliana shook her long black hair, her albino white face fixing on him as her short tail whacked his rear. “Own up! No avoiding the question.”

  Matt took her warm hand in his, trying to feel lighthearted. “Well, 18 Scorpii is a near twin of Earth’s star Sol. A G2V main sequence star. So yellow it is and warm it is for the single small planet that circles it at 1.5 AU. There is a large naval shipyard there, according to the Intelligence memory crystal we snatched earlier. Its loss would be noted by the Anarchate and by Combat Command.”

  “Oh.” Eliana’s mind scanned dozens of reasons for Matt to pick this star versus any other military base. “OK. Why there versus any other base?”

  He smiled to himself. “The oldest military reason of all. It’s there. It’s not far from Alkalurops. And its destruction will signal to the Anarchate that we are not taking the ‘bait’ of going after Commander Chai.”

  “We aren’t?”

  “Of course we are,” he said as they slowed to enter their roomsuite. “But later. After I’ve laid a few false signals to confuse the planning of Combat Command.”

  “Signals? Matt, you are confusing me.”

  He stopped walking, the smiled. “You’ve been studying Sun Tzu. My reason for attacking 18 Scorpii is the reason he gave millennia ago. Do you recall which aphorism he gave?”

  She frowned at him, her pale white face looking rebellious. “It’s a small book, The Art Of War. But I don’t have it memorized.”

  “I do,” Matt said, tapping the admit pad beside their roomsuite’s s
lidedoor. “He said—The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle. For if he does not know where I intend to give battle he must prepare in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one place will be few. This will always be our advantage against the Anarchate.”

  She nodded and led him inside their roomsuite. “What happens after 18 Scorpii?”

  “Well, we head next for 51 Pegasi. It’s where Suzanne studied programming at the Anarchate academy on planet Module. Third in orbit about a G5V main sequence yellow star.”

  “You aren’t going to destroy where she went to school!”

  “Nope.” Low ceiling lights came on, illuminating the puffer fish aquarium that was a favorite of Matt’s, while his loom showed his Navajo Corn Maiden tapestry still half-finished. “But planet one is Bellerophon. A gas giant about the size of Neptune. It’s a ‘hot Jupiter’ that rotates so close to 51 Pegasi its surface heat is 1,200 degrees centigrade.” He shrugged off his black and white checkered yukata robe and headed for the bed pedestal. “Coming?”

  Eliana stood there, just inside the roomsuite, her forehead creased as she tried to figure out why they would be attacking a hot Jupiter planet. Or so her mindflow said. “OK. I’m stumped. Why attack Bellerophon?”

  “We aren’t. Won’t. But planet two is the base for a galactic tachnet node of the Anarchate. The planet is a Mercury analogue, no atmosphere, no native life, just lots of hot rocks and vacuum surrounding the node domes. I plan to . . . vaporize the planet. People all over Orion Arm will notice when their tachlink messages don’t go through to their investment brokers.”

  Eliana smiled at him. “I like. Anything that upsets bankers is fine with me. And vaporizing a planet will cause tidal surges out to planet three and the academy. Whose students will talk endlessly about your attack.” He grinned agreement. She shrugged off her green jumpsuit, becoming as nude as Matt. “It’s been a long time, Matt. Do you . . . do you still want me?”

  Into her mind, via their joint tachlink, he showed her how both his body and his heart wanted her. Wanted her as much as he wanted life. Wanted the touch of her hands. The softness of her kiss. The joy of her smile—

  “Shut your mind up and let’s get started with the basics!”

  They both shut off their minds.

  ###

  Commander Chai stood at his WorkPad pedestal and watched a vidcast recovered from a dead genome slaver ship. It depicted the destruction of 309 genome slaver starships near the Alkalurops C star, in Orion Arm. Nearby stood Kontine, sipping from a tube of water as two of his eyestalks watched the holo and the other two monitored the four research assistants who were working frantically to build a readout on the Human renegade’s multiple starships.

  “Chief Assistant Kontine,” called the Meligun bear Rak alk-thorn. “Analysis indicates there are eight enemy starships firing on the slaver ships.”

  “Where did this hairless Human obtain seven more warships?” he asked sharply.

  Kontine’s oval shell lowered on its legs in a sign of submission and regret. “Perhaps at the home world of the T’Chak aliens? In the Small Magellanic Cloud. That was the source for his original starship, of which we have numerous images.”

  “Images do not destroy ships!” he snarled at his hapless assistant, who had only stated the obvious. “Look here! The twenty-group of battleglobes arrive!”

  The space near the slaver rendezvous beacon shimmered, then went normal. Not far from the beacon a new area of space shimmered, revealed eight reptilian-shaped starships appearing from Translation, then the ships disappeared behind Alcubierre shields as dozens of laser beams struck at that spot. The vidcast switched over to the multi-spectral record of the Observer Globe ejected by High Captain Yorkel upon his arrival in response to cries for help from some slaver ships. In short order Yorkel’s twenty ships began firing lasers, antimatter beams and thermonuke torps toward the shimmer spot. A spot from which eight groups of counterfire originated. All too quickly five battleglobes were vaporized by antimatter fire from the hidden warships. His mind gained brief hope as he saw Yorkel split his forces into ten heading straight at the enemy locus, while five rose sharply in an arc as they sought to flank the invisible enemy ships from a side angle. It did not work. The oncoming ten died from a withering stream of antimatter beams, while two of the five-group also blew apart. Just as he thought his enemy Yorkel would die in this hopeless battle, the Brokeet’s three remaining battleglobes disappeared into Translation. He looked aside at Kontine.

  “Is that all?”

  The Loglan’s four eyestalks focused solely on him. The master of the amphibian’s fate. But his six legs lowered even more toward the metal floor of their Intelligence node habitat. “Illustrious Commander Chai, who rightly alerted Combat Command to the Alkalurops attack, whose foresight—”

  “Out with it!”

  Kontine’s mouth palps shivered, moved sideways, then clicked slowly in Belizel. “High Captain Yorkel retreated to Megil system to defend the naval base at Salla, the moon of Megil. He made extensive preparations, dispatched tachlink Remotes and x-ray Picket Globes and—”

  “Do you wish to die of thirst? Or perhaps dry into a husk shell beneath the ceiling radiator of Entertainment Globe Fourteen?” Chai knew it was bad news, otherwise one of his research assistants would have told him the data in an effort to earn personal favor. How bad the news was remained to be tasted.

  Kontine dropped his water squeeze bottle to the floor, straightened his exoskeleton legs and acted as if it were an honor to give bad news. “Sir! The Observer Globe data from the Megil/Salla moon battle was received just recently. Central Distribution sent one copy to us, and one to High Commander Brrzeet. To whom that copy was addressed. It shows the total defeat of the three battleglobes in Megil system, the destruction of the Flesh Markets on Megil and the taking captive of High Captain Yorkel and his crew, after which battleglobe Defiant was vaporized by this Human Dragoneaux.”

  Bad news. Extremely bad news. But the stiff fur of the Meligun researcher told him there was more to this vidcast than what Kontine had said. “How did High Captain Yorkel manage to survive the destruction of his battleglobe?”

  Kontine’s four eyestalks wilted a bit, their color going from pale brown to dark yellow. “He offered tactical intelligence to this Human Dragoneaux.”

  Why was Kontine so reticent? “And?”

  The mouth palps clacked together, then spoke as if very dry. “The intelligence High Captain Yorkel offered in return for his life and that of his crew was the exact location of you, Commander, and the spatial coordinates of this base. Along with copies of all missives you sent to High Captain Yorkel. Sir.”

  His Whiskers of Distinction lost their alertness and his tail fell limply to the metal floor. The personal safety he thought he’d gained by becoming the expert on this hairless biped was now gone, replaced by a vulnerability he had never felt before in his life. He did not like the feeling. Just then a message tone sounded from the pedestal of Rak alk-thorn the black-furred Meligun. “Yes?” he said, his stomach telling him the message would not be pleasant.

  The pink eyes of Rak looked his way. “High Commander Brrzeet has ordered your presence in his Command Node. Immediately. Sir.”

  Chai shivered a bit. Then realizing five sets of eyes and eyestalks were turned his way, he lifted his black tail, laid it over his left shoulder, combed out his deep black whiskers with the claw-nails of one hand, and turned for the exit pressure door.

  “Kontine, continue the analysis of the two vidcasts. Seek for a means to destroy this Human and his . . . eight ships.”

  Just before he entered the access tubeway, Kontine called to him. “They are seven ships, Commander. It seems High Captain Yorkel destroyed one of the Human’s Dreadnought ships in the last battle. Sir.”

  Walking to his likely doom, Chai felt dry humor inside his middle gut. Twenty battleglobes gone in exchange for a single alien Dreadnought ship.
Why, it would only take 140 battleglobes to cause this Human pest to be extinguished from the Anarchate universe. News that he was sure would not please anyone superior to himself.

  Brrzeet, High Commander of Sector 14 Intelligence within star system CC93721, lifted off his Contemplation Couch and moved to his control pedestal in the middle of his Command Node. His assistants were nearby, but below him in one of the lower levels where hired minds did his bidding. Or died. Or breathed vacuum. He cared little for their lives. Only that they produce useful results. And now he must face the body and mind of Commander Chai, an arrogant Spelidon, like all of them, who had direct knowledge of this renegade biped named Dragoneaux. That biped had now upset the Council of Sixteen which ruled the Anarchate from Central Nexus. Or at least, upset Mindstorm, the council member who oversaw his Intelligence work. He snorted through his wide mouth, crossed his forearms over his brown-scaled chest and fixed each eye on the entry slidedoor. The door through which this underweight Chai would enter. Brrzeet weighed six times the mass of the whiskered Spelidon, and his four massive legs supported a bulk rarely matched among Anarchate species. Fortunate he was that, among his Orko cousins, his mind was the sharpest.

  “Commander Chai seeks entry, illustrious High Commander,” said the annunciator above the slidedoor.

  “Enter,” he muttered.

  The black-furred, black-whiskered, long-tailed and two-legged Spelidon entered his node and clapped hands together in the Clap of Obedience. An action normal to his home world, but irrelevant to Sector 14 Intelligence. “Why should you continue to live?”