While most lay along the approaches to the Admin asteroid that housed Halicene workers and staff, many were widely dispersed in case the Human Dragoneaux appeared on the opposite side of the star system. Such an action would not cause his fleet of forty Nova battleglobes to leave their defensive positions around the shipyard. He would not be drawn out into a string of starships that could be picked off singly, or bypassed by a quick Translation jump from the far system side to within range of the asteroid. While the Human had shown himself to be crafty and deadly dangerous, he, the Brokeet in charge of the largest fleet ever assembled in this part of Sector 14, was more experienced in fleet maneuvers.
Yorkel made sure the x-ray Picket Globes were set on autofire to blast x-rays at the vector line of a gravity wave pulse. Many would miss the Human’s Dreadnought warship, but some would impact on it. Hopefully before the Human raised his Alcubierre space-time shields. And lying in stealth mode were dozens of 30 megaton bomb Offense sleds that could achieve one-quarter lightspeed on their own. They were a new weapon he had crafted at Polaris B and caused to be loaded onto his battleglobes. The Offense sleds were also set on autofire mode to accelerate toward the incoming vector line. Finally, he had confiscated several short wavelength ruby mining lasers and placed them along the approach line that the Supply Tube ships took when delivering optoelectronic parts for the Halicene MotherShips. Like his other outlying offensive Remotes, these lasers were set on autofire since they would have only femtoseconds in which to sense the gravity wave of the Human’s emergence into normal space-time, then fire at the gravity wave vector. Again, most would miss as the T’Chak ship moved along the vector that would bring it to the Admin asteroid. But a few might impact before the shields went up.
“Sector Captain,” called Malel from the right, “are you in neurolink with Defiant’s weapons systems?”
“I am,” he said aloud, working hard at the job of splitting his mind’s attention between normal speech mode and the fast sensory inputs as his ship’s antimatter cannons and Bethe Inducer projector fed him data over fiber optic relays. “As are the various weapons crews across this battleglobe. We are prepared to respond as fast as neurolink allows.”
Tactical Officer Lark raised one hand from his post. “All ship Tactical systems are on alert, Sector Captain. Alternate weapons crews are ready to replace current crews as their shift ends.”
Yorkel felt inner satisfaction. While his chitin exoskeleton did not allow him the mammalian indulgence of smiling or showing facial expressions, his sensory antennae and the pheromone flow from the Brokeets on the Bridge told him everyone was eager for battle. Anxious even.
“Outstanding, Lark. However, it may be days before the Human shows up. So be sure each crew takes meal and rest breaks in between their weapons neurolink service.”
Malel looked his way with all four yellow eyes showing concern. “Sector Captain, you too need to rest and refuel.”
“Eventually, Malel. Eventually. Right now I wish to roam this ship’s weapons systems. We know not the direction our opponent will appear. But when he does, there will be lightspeed attacks that may disable him.”
Matt relaxed into ocean-time as Mata Hari neared the moment of exit from Translation. They would materialize at the spot used by the Supply Tubes when they exited Translation on their way to deliver supplies. But Supply Tubes could only move at quarter lightspeed velocities. His ship would exit at a full three-fourths lightspeed. If weapons were waiting for him to emerge, he expected to outpace their efforts to harm him. The coolness of the glass chair that he occupied in the Interlock Pit spoke to him in slow, human muscle fiber signals.
Five hundred and thirty-two milliseconds, murmured his internal cyberclock.
“Matthew, in one second,” Mata Hari said in his mind as oceans of ship data flowed over his mind, even as a three dee holo of the system space near the Admin asteroid occupied part of his mental attention.
“Are the 73 Megil captives secure under inertial restraint?”
An image of dozens of aliens and nine Humans filled his mind, each of them lying on a bed or couch in their roomsuites. They had become used to orders announced by Mata Hari or Gatekeeper, even though he had visited with them in person the last few days. The two Human families had shown joy at their liberation and had insisted on feeding him a homemade meal during a family picnic in the Park. He had attended and done his best to entertain the young children. They had loved it when he had given each of them a ride on his shoulders. While they also wanted to see him in Suit, outfitted like a two-legged battle-tank, that he had declined. There was too much on the outside of Suit that little fingers could disturb. Anyway, he liked being ‘bare’ for the days they’d spent in Translation.
“Yes, Matthew,” said the Lady of the Sword persona image of Mata Hari. She wore silver chain mail, the leather skirt and held her steel broadsword in both hands, as if to slash and hack at an oncoming opponent. “My partner Gatekeeper is monitoring their condition.”
He smiled mentally at her. “Great to have you at my side,” he said, then perceived the holo appearance of BattleMind to his right. “And the same to you, great flying dragon of the T’Chak.”
The whirlwind of BattleMind’s mentality was focused on ship weapons systems and the Sun Glow weapon in the Restricted Rooms. But a small tendril of thought showed dry amusement at Matt’s image-term for the AI.
One second, five hundred and forty-three milliseconds.
Before him the holosphere went from grey to normal black space, sprinkled with stars the color of jewels. The gravity wave of their emergence went out. In short femtoseconds Matt released thousands of tachlink and sensor Remotes, four decoy Remotes that would imitate the appearance and electronic noise of his real ship, while sensorBeads, limpet complinks and Hunter-Killer torps spread out ahead of him. He thought the order for the nose shields to come up first, then—
“Impact!” screamed Mata Hari in a tone of pain as she caused the winged dragon shape of their ship to rotate, thereby reducing the chance of a laser penetrating the adaptive optics sapphire crystals seeded by the millions over the flexhull of his ship.
In Matt’s mind and in his physical body he felt pain. Sharp pain as three x-ray lasers hit his right ship side, cutting into the ceramic armor that lay below the flexmetal hull. A ruby red laser also struck at that spot. Then two more red lasers struck near the snout of his ship, but were absorbed by the front Alcubierre shields. Their wavelength strength exceeded four thousand megawatts, per the laser frequency sensors that covered the hull. A human scream sounded in his ship Ears as one of the lasers breached a roomsuite. Into his mind came the image of a three year-old girl, with blond hair and pink cheeks, whose mouth was open in a high-pitched scream as her mother’s head vaporized from a penetrating red laser beam.
“Shields fully deployed!” cried Mata Hari as Matt’s stomach began to surge gastric acids preparatory to vomiting.
He could not afford physical distractions. Somehow, someway, High Captain Yorkel had laid an autofire attack that anticipated where he would appear. Either that, or there were millions of x-ray Picket Globes filling the Upsilon Carinae B star system. Mind reeling from the pain of the x-ray and laser impacts onto his ship skin as his mind felt shock from the image of the girl’s mother being decapitated before her daughter, Matt acted.
“Shift vector line upward! Now! Use the Repulsors and supplement with the deut-li thrusters. Add antimatter to the thrust so we get far away from this vector line!”
One second, 900 milliseconds, 320 nanoseconds, 14 picoseconds and 6 femtoseconds.
The angry roar of BattleMind as the T’Chak AI sensed what Matt sensed was combined with the fierce-eyed snarl of Mata Hari as the three of them moved through ship systems at speeds of milliseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds and even femtoseconds. Matt could not achieve femtosecond thought. But what he could do vastly exceeded the speed of fiber optic neurolinking as practiced on board the battleglobes and on any other ar
med starship. The thoughts of Yorkel only moved at one hundred twenty meters per second, versus his thoughts that moved at two-thirds of lightspeed thanks to optical neurolinking.
The six antimatter cannons on his wings each fired at a separate target. Six battleglobes that lay within 50,000 kilometers of starship Mata Hari lost a large part of their twelve kilometer hull as his neutron antimatter beams connected.
Twenty-three Picket Globes were destroyed by pink beams from his proton lasers before they could explode and shoot x-rays his way. Other Picket Globes had already exploded but their x-rays either hit behind him, impacted on the Alcubierre fields or missed due to his vector line change.
Two seconds, 100 milliseconds, 609 nanoseconds, 64 picoseconds and 43 femtoseconds, said his cyberclock.
Three of the sensorRemotes that preceded Matt reported by tachlink the sudden movement of six Offense sleds. The sleds had dropped their Stealth camo and now approached intersection with his adjusted course at one-fourth lightspeed. A thought-command directed neutral particle laser domes to fire on the approaching sleds, which were still a thousand kilometers away.
The course change by the sleds told him that Yorkel had seeded the area near the Admin asteroid with thousands of tachlink Remotes so the Brokeet alien would know instantly the new vector taken by Matt and Dreadnought Mata Hari.
Looking ahead with his mind, sensing the 120,000 miles per second speed of his ship as its Translation exit velocity moved him toward his target almost faster than an eye could see, he became aware that another 34 battleglobes were arranged around the asteroid in four groups. Each group had fired black antimatter beams at him, while each hull sparkled with powerful laser emissions. Shortly those beams would impact on the nose of his ship.
“Sun Glow weapon is ready!” growled BattleMind as it extruded the cluster of neutrino emission tubes from the ship’s belly. “We can reduce the asteroid once we are within 10,000 kilometers of it!”
Three seconds, 90 milliseconds, 820 nanoseconds, 12 picoseconds and three femtoseconds.
Even as Gatekeeper moved to the roomsuite with the dead mother, shocked father and screaming child, Matt thought swiftly of what he could do to offset the ‘wait in ambush and lightspeed attack’ advantage that he had long used. But which Yorkel now used against him. His objective was known. His every vector change was instantly known. Thousands of Offense Remotes were attacking or ready to attack, including thermonuke sleds like the six that now exploded behind him. Either they had to Translate out of the system, find a new weapon or decimate the forces arranged against them.
The sneaky part of Matt’s mind spoke to him. He smiled. “Mata Hari, activate both the Bethe Inducer and the Graviton Beam. Aim one at one cluster of battleglobes and the other at a different cluster. How soon before we can fire them and reach those battleglobes?”
The Lady of the Sword swung her laser sword, destroying several dozen nearby sensor Remotes and two bomb sleds. “Two point four seconds. Before then the antimatter cannons will be recharged. Their targets?”
“Battleglobes in a third cluster!” Matt snarled as his ship Eyes saw the Human father jump from inertial restraint to grab his daughter and hold her tight to his chest.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Four hits!” cried Lark from his Tactical Cluster post.
Yorkel felt intense satisfaction that his placement of x-ray Picket Globes, thermonuke sleds and the mining lasers had hit the Human’s Dreadnought before it could raise every Alcubierre space-time shield. Then he winced at the real-time image of six antimatter beams leaving the grey-clouded ship and impacting on six nearby battleglobes. One was totally vaporized while the other five had deep wounds that killed crew. But they were operational and now fired AM beams at the shield-protected Dreadnought.
“Move!” he cried over the tachyon comlink that connected him with the captain of each battleglobe in his fleet. “Vary your vectors, be random in movement. Staying in one place allows the Human to lightspeed target you!”
Malel’s brown fingers moved over his circle of datapanels and WorkPads. “They are moving, Sector Captain. As we practiced.”
In his mind’s-eye Yorkel ‘saw’ the image of thirty-nine battleglobes, plus his own Nova that had the mass of the Admin asteroid between him and direct line of sight of the Dreadnought. The four clusters began swirling through space even as their laser domes and antimatter projectors fired at the spot where the incoming T’Chak ship would be. Thanks to the tachlink Remotes, the Tactical CPU of every ship could project the future location of the Human and shoot where it would be, rather than shoot at where it had been. Seeing his opponent’s moves in real-time combined with random globe movement was something the entire fleet had practiced in Polaris B system. He had calculated it as the only method for survival against a near invulnerable warship that had armaments as deadly as the Anarchate.
“The Human is counter-attacking!” whistled Lark as his black fur stood stiff and his scaly black tail thumped the Bridge gravplates.
Yorkel saw six new antimatter beams reach out to impact on six battleglobes in Sector Four, directly opposite his Sector One cluster. Two of them went to nova vaporization as the black antimatter beam penetrated to the inner weapons holds with their magfield held antimatter. Four others were badly wounded, but now rotated operational sides to face the approaching enemy. The Human’s ship speared toward them at three-fourths lightspeed, a velocity that threw off the targeting calculations of most CPUs.
“Emit decoys of Defiant,” he cried in voice and in his mind to those crew controlling the cargoholds. “Go to Stealth now!”
Yorkel ignored the frustrated pheromones emitted by most of his Bridge crew. Being weapons silent would keep the Human from focusing on his battleglobe and might leave him a chance to get in a deadly blow.
Then a pale green beam hit six battleglobes in Sector Three, causing them to disappear. A nearby tachlink Remote said only particles of neutron star remained in that space. Soft skin! The Human had fired his Bethe Inducer at ships rather than at a planet or the asteroid!
An orange beam reached out and impacted seven battleglobes in Sector Two. They too disappeared though a nearby Remote said there now existed seven tiny black holes where once seven ships of his fleet had existed.
“Malel! What kind of weapon is that orange beam!” he cried aloud.
Four yellow eyes looked his way. “They were coherent gravitons! Somehow they caused the matter of each ship to implode to the black hole state.”
Nausea hit both his inner stomachs. Blue-white flares of antimatter destruction and rainbow laser explosions filled the space around the Admin asteroid. In his mind, the three dee holo of the space around him showed only twenty-four operational battleglobes, including his own. But what could he do against a Bethe Inducer beam stronger than their own weapon, let alone against an alien T’Chak weapon that turned objects into black holes?
Matt’s mind felt the weight of ocean-time immersion in the lightspeed thoughts of Mata Hari and BattleMind, as Gatekeeper saw to the safety of the human family that had lost a mother. One part of the ship sensors told him that his battle strikes had killed fifteen battleglobes, leaving Yorkel with 24 operational craft. But there still remained nine MotherShip hulks in orbit about the Admin asteroid, plus minor Halicene craft that were just now moving away or toward the asteroid on Repulsor or thruster power. Another set of his ship’s sensors said repairBots were spinning new carbon-carbon nanotube fiber to repair the ship’s flexhull skin, even as Mata Hari herself was adding extra armor foam to the space sides of each occupied roomsuite. Fortunately only he and his AI partners knew of the death in the Human roomsuite. The other Humans and dozens of aliens who lay restrained under inertial fields would learn the results of this battle once it was over. And Matt had tough decisions to make.
“Within range for the Sun Glow weapon!” cried Mata Hari even as BattleMind moved to fire at the asteroid.
“Spread the beam!” he mind-thought to Batt
leMind. “So it takes in the orbiting Mother Ship hulks along with the asteroid.”
A mental grunt from BattleMind tapped his awareness, much the way a hurricane strips a leaf from a twig. Fortunate he was that Mata Hari had long since inserted a portion of herself as a buffer between his organic mind and the ferocious strength of the T’Chak dragon’s mind. “Firing!” it snarled loudly, resembling the acoustic impact of an emergency siren multiplied by a factor of a million.
Six seconds, 300 milliseconds, 123 nanoseconds, six picoseconds and 13 femtoseconds, murmured his cyberclock.
In his mind’s-eye, where time and thoughts moved at nanosecond and millisecond speeds, he took in the tachlink feeds from the Remotes he’d emitted upon Translation exit. They were flying at three-fourths lightspeed parallel to his original vector, while his ship twisted, moved left, moved down toward the system’s ecliptic plane, then spiraled slowly to allow all six antimatter cannons on his two wings to fire at both wounded and untouched battleglobes. The black AM beams often missed since their target vector was FTL signaled to the target battleglobe that was moving randomly as part of a cluster group. But some impacted. Then the Sun Glow’s broad yellow beam impacted the grey cratered surface of the airless asteroid that hosted worker habitats and Admin towers, along with underground food and air bunkers. That beam included most of the orbiting hulks. And that beam carried a message for Yorkel and the Anarchate—surrender or face total annihilation!
Yorkel’s mental vision blurred as several nearby tachlink Remotes transmitted to him by FTL tachyon emissions the image of the grey asteroid that still lay between him and his opponent. A white spear reached out from the rapidly nearing Dreadnought and impacted the entire opposite hemisphere of the asteroid. That broad beam also took in seven of the nine MotherShip hulks still under construction. Before he could blink mentally, all of them became a roiling yellow globe of G-class star plasma that seemed to be the size of a battleglobe. Not the massively large solid asteroid that had been there less than a second earlier.
Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) Page 16
