The mind image of a two-winged, two legged, two-armed and purple armored reptile who stood three times taller than he did, emitted the sound that Humans called a laugh. Unlike the leg rasp normal to civilized Brokeet. “You begin to show signs of humor, small Brokeet. That is good. Our allies of the Human species place much value in finding humor during times of high stress.”
“And your perfect organic masters the T’Chak, did they ever exhibit this humor you so value?”
Gondu slapped the mental floor with her spite-tipped tail, then showed the white teeth lining her long mouth. “In a sense. The Human term would be ‘dry humor’. You Brokeet would call it a ‘slow rasp’. Now, come with me as you become simultaneous with this ship.”
Ocean-time switched on in his mind and Toktaleen felt as if a giant whirlpool now pulled his mind and his self under, below the surface of normality. With a sharp intake of air through his spiracles, he let go his attachment to ‘slow time’ and entered the realm of picoseconds, nanoseconds and long milliseconds. Thousands of inputs and hundreds of images impacted various parts of his brain lobes, cross-linking with physical parts of him. His feet became the deut-li fusion pulse space drive, while his waist arms became the six Alcubierre space-time emission nodes that protected the ship from all matter and energy weapons. His upper arms turned into the black wings of a T’Chak. Each wing carried three neutron antimatter cannons that were fed by three of the onboard fusion reactors. The wings could also twist him in space, move sideways, lift the ship on Repulsor blocks, or bring it to a full stop. Eventually. Exiting at three-fourths lightspeed was both an advantage and a problem since it took normal time to slow down. Anyway, it was his ponderous abdomen that housed the superweapons of the T’Chak. They were the Sun Glow neutrino beam, the quark-based Graviton Beam that emitted coherent gravitons and the axial Plasma Cannon that shot out two hundred meter-wide globes of purple plasma. They made him feel bottom-heavy. Still, those weapons were the wonder of the T’Chak and the AI Gondu. He preferred to operate normal weapons like the antimatter cannons, HF and CO2 lasers, pressor and tractor breams, and slow solid matter weapons such as the Fire-and-Forget missiles.
Gondu piled more inputs into his mind, his awareness, feeling both eager and anxious. “Hurry, please, organic Toktaleen. I understand you had less time for pilot training than the other organic pilots, but your species is well-suited to neurolink combat.”
Toktaleen recalled the memory sharing by Dragoneaux, which included the counterfire efforts of Yorkel, a fellow Brokeet. However, Yorkel belonged to the Nest Aggressor of the colony planet Jagged Land. So he owed no Nest duties to Yorkel’s nest, thus making him free to fight Yorkel as if the other sought to claim his wife and offspring for his own nest. Such was normal among the Brokeet. All nests valued members who could protect their offspring source. Which may be why his Nest Adventurous did not pursue the genome ship that raided the countryside of his newly inhabited world. He had failed to prevent the capture of his lifemate and his infant. Or perhaps they did pursue and were left behind. His knowledge of the Morrigan cloneslave raid, its abrupt ending by Dragoneaux, and the Vigilante’s decimation of the slaver fleet near Alkalurops C star, told him that those who chose work as genome harvesters now faced a deadly enemy. He gave thanks that he had lived long enough to see someone work to end the Anarchate’s tolerance of such an uncivilized practice.
“Speeding up now, Gondu,” he said, wrenching his mind away from distractions. Telling the reactors to feed more antimatter to the magfield reservoirs for the cannons, he initiated the creation of a plasma ball deep in the base of the Plasma Cannon. Spitting out a plasma ball, along with hundreds of sensorRemotes and tachRemotes, was the first duty of every ship when it exited Translation and entered normal space-time.
“Good. We exit . . . now!”
Eliana’s precognition told her that she and the other ships of Ocean Fleet faced a multi-layered defense by the Anarchate naval base that occupied the fourth planet of system CC8733, a G1V yellow neighbor of the supergiant star Vela HD 81471.
“Should we change our Translation exit to a point closer to planet three?” called Suzanne over their telepathic mindlink. “Who cares if we cause earthquakes from Translation exit?”
“That would only leave untouched the combat systems that would pursue us as we exited,” Eliana said, musing over their options as most of her mind sped along in ocean-time linkage with the ship systems of Altuna, and the mind of Altuna herself.
Altuna entered the outer, non-psychic parts of hers and Suzanne’s minds. “We could exit near the G1V main sequence star, activate our Bethe Inducer, and move the star into a nova phase. Then Translate out. The nova’s expansion of its corona out to the orbit of planet four would destroy the base, while its charged energy fields would damage or destroy all the Remotes the base has seeded in this system.”
Eliana, mentally tracking the short milliseconds before they exited into the system, thanked her allies for their tachspeed help and reached over her embedded tachlink node to Matthew and Mata Hari.
“Matthew, have Mata Hari change our exit coordinates to the space between planets four and five. That is where most of the active duty battleglobes congregate,” she said, feeling the surprise in Matt’s mind as she issued a command that would cause all 507 T’Chak warships to make a sudden change in their exit location. “Yes, I know it’s a bother to switch from our planned entry just beyond planet seven, but it will give us the most combat targets, versus shooting down thousands of combat Remotes.”
Her love smiled at her with his mind and with his inner heart, sharing his feeling of absolute trust in her. It shook her to the core, even though he’d said the same upon his return to Morrigan system. He’d been incredibly complimentary to her and Suzanne over their fleet practice maneuvers. She had dismissed it as typical male overtalk of basic issues. But the ‘feel’ of his mind now, that said he’d really meant it. And that he hesitated not in accepting her Translation exit change.
Matt’s mind image went ‘distant’ a moment, then he mindspoke to the AIs and living pilots of the 507 ships that made up Ocean Fleet. “Exit coordinates change. For better targeting. We enter between planets four and five, with our vector aimed for a long pass-by of the base on four, and the battleglobes clustered in that area. Expect a move into combat cluster groups like those we faced from Yorkel, in Upsilon Carinae B system. Bring up your shields immediately after emitting sensors and Remotes, and your first plasma globe!”
She gave a mental hug to Suzanne, dismissed the mental mind chatter from the future as thousands of beings reacted to the attack by Ocean Fleet, and fixed her attention on the dragon shape of Altuna and her partner’s ‘feel’ as a male T’Chak. She felt the determined mindsense of her Hexagon Prime fellows, grinned at how Rafael and his ship BattleMate were determined to take revenge for the laser beam that had frightened his Rebecca and their children, then put most of her mind focus on the multiple weapons systems of Altuna. The Sun Glow and Graviton Beam were both ready to emit, when she gave them a target, while the axial Plasma Cannon was already nurturing its first plasma globe. Altuna’s snout would belch the purple globe to clear her forward path of nanoRemotes and tachRemotes seeded by the naval base commanders. The flexhull’s sapphire crystals were ready to reflect laser fire that might hit them before the Alcubierre shields went up. In her mind, the empty greyness of Translation instantly changed to the star-studded darkness of normal space-time.
“Four battleglobes at north ecliptic, twenty-one degrees!” cried Altuna in her mind even as their own decoys, Remotes, sensorBeads, torps, Offense and Defense sleds moved away, followed by the greyness of Alcubierre shields fore, aft, top, bottom, right and left.
“Fire left wing antimatter beams at them!” she ordered, then told the three AM cannons on her right wing to target three Offense sleds that were crossing their orbital vector.
Matt’s mind focus at the center of their group of seven rotating warships that encircle
d him like a wheel on an axle, that focus impacted her hard. She shuddered with him as mind images from all 507 Dreadnought warships tach-sped to his mind.
Black antimatter beams speared out from the cloud of dreadnoughts that made up Ocean Fleet, moving either forward or sideways, so long as no fleet ally lay in the way. The four battleglobes she’d aimed for were also struck by a dozen other AM beams fired by members of the nearest 50-ship cohort. They turned to blue-white vapor.
Pink proton beams struck out and vaporized hundreds of tiny Remotes that were scattered across the wide space between planets four and five. There was no danger from impact given the vastness of space, but every ship sought to reduce the tachlink Remotes which reported real-time images of their actions to distant naval commanders.
Metal-punch hydrogen-fluorine lasers zapped into dozens of sensorBeads, Seek-Identify sensors, Offense sleds, a few x-ray Picket Globes that had not yet exploded, and attackBeads that aimed for the magnetic fields that most ships used to deflect charged stellar radiation.
Briefly, her mind sorted out the real-time sensor and vid images that every ship in the fleet had received in the short femtoseconds before shields went up.
A total of 62 battleglobes occupied the space between planets four and five, with 50 of them arranged into five rapidly moving battle clusters like those used by Yorkel in his defense of the Halicene shipyard. The remaining twelve were engaged in routine traffic outward or inward to the high plateau on planet four that hosted the surface installations of Sector 14 naval base. Four of them had just died and others that lay within AM range were being hit by multiple antimatter beams.
Just above planet four, fourteen fast Couriers had activated their fusion pulse engines and were trying to move so they would not become a target of lightspeed weapons. Weapons that would arrive at the same time they saw them.
Two of the transiting battleglobes had reached the atmosphere refuelers of the Jupiter-like planet five. One stayed in place to refuel while the second changed course, then vanished into Translation.
“Matthew!” she cried as her precognition of the future hit hard. “Hexagon Prime must move outward! Now! A battleglobe is trying a kamikaze materialization into you and Mata Hari!”
As fast as thought the dreadnoughts controlled by her, Suzanne, Sarah, Toktaleen, Rafael, George, Matt and the AI Flowering used angled fusion pulse thrust and Repulsor packs to move outward from the vector line of their arrival. A space ten thousand kilometers wide opened between her and her opposite number on the other side of their circling wheel.
A twelve kilometer-wide Nova battleglobe popped into the space where Matt and Mata Hari had just been, but lagging a bit behind as their ship’s Combat CPU made an error in lightspeed computation. The north pole of the battleglobe began to shimmer with Bethe Inducer activation as it sought to turn starship Mata Hari into stellar particles. She beat the enemy commander by a matter of forty-three milliseconds.
From the belly of Altuna the emission tubes of the Sun Glow weapon fired a white beam. Once the coherent neutrinos touched the surface of the battleglobe, the enemy vessel began to turn vaporous, then collapsed suddenly into a plasma ball of yellow stellar fire. She gave thanks for her precognition and for her ability to think slightly faster than even Matthew. She also gave thanks for their three-fourths lightspeed velocity upon Translation exit. In the sixty seconds before the tiny stellar plasma sublimed into a miniature nova, she and the other members of Ocean Fleet would be far away. And much closer to planet four. The source of naval ship captains who had become all too dangerous, thanks to their study of Yorkel’s maneuvers. Time to end this. Soon, very soon, the fleet would be within 100,000 kilometers of the five battleglobe clusters. Then hundreds of black antimatter beams would reach out and obliterate large portions of Sector 14’s naval strength.
“It is time to end this, my dear Eliana,” said Matt in her mind as she felt his relief at her warning, his anger at an Anarchate commander that would order a crewed ship to kill itself in an attack on an enemy, and his determination. “It is time for the ‘tip of the spear’ to drive home the pointlessness of opposing me.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Matt aimed the Mata Hari at the right-side battleglobe cluster, drawing the seven other members of Hexagon Prime with him. In the back of his mind he sent the Cohort leader AIs the command to concentrate their antimatter fire upon the battleglobe clusters, leaving lasers for the minor irritant of sensorRemotes, tachRemotes and Offense sleds. With 100 T’Chak warships concentrating fire on a single cluster, the Anarchate captains were outnumbered ten to one in the quantity of offensive and counterfire they could unleash. Since the battleglobes had no way to block antimatter beams fired by his fleet, every battleglobe within targeting range would shortly become blue-white explosions from matter-antimatter impact. To his right he sensed the holo of BattleMind reaching for the Sun Glow weapon to use against planet four.
“No, battlemate. Use the Graviton Beam against the naval base planet. That will leave a black hole of the same mass in its orbit, thereby leaving this system relatively intact.”
“Why?” growled the thunderous mindtalk of BattleMind as his red eyes swept away dozens of Remotes that the combat ready battleglobes had seeded into the space near planet four. “I would use the Bethe Inducer to make nova this local star if our vector brought us close to it! That would be an object lesson to our enemies.”
Matt’s mind split into seven more segments as he ‘looked over’ the mental shoulder of each Hexagon Prime pilot, while also directing Mata Hari and Gatekeeper in their efforts to maintain ship eco-fields while also feeding energy and antimatter to the dozens of weapons domes that studded the outer flexhull. He also gave mental words of encouragement to the forty Morrigan pilots spread among the Cohorts of Ocean Fleet. Already black beams of antimatter were reaching out from his fleet, the beams laid down in a bracketing pattern that would catch the off-vector movements of enemy battleglobes despite the fleet’s lack of nearby tachlink Remotes. Even though the Anarchate ships had real-time status feeds of Ocean Fleet, while the fleet was limited to slow lightspeed images reflected from battleglobe hulls, still, the fact Ocean Fleet outnumbered the naval fleet by five to one could not be resisted. As he mentally pointed out to BattleMind.
“There is no need to cause the local star to go nova. Instead, let us focus on targeting every battleglobe in this system!”
BattleMind hissed his displeasure in a gale force mental wind that staggered Matt’s mental coherence. Thankfully Mata Hari still served buffer duty between them, even as she split her own attention to the direction of counterfire by the ship’s lasers and wing antimatter cannons.
A ping! signal from Suzanne relayed an Anarchate transmission that Altuna had intercepted and decoded. The outgoing signal sought the return of twenty-four battleglobes recently sent to Thuringia system. Where, it seemed, his opponents Chai and Yorkel were now stationed. According to the attached request signal. He grinned, feeling happy he had once more attacked where the Anarchate did not expect him.
“Matthew, the clusters are disappearing,” Mata Hari said as she filled part of his mind with a holo of space within the range of their ship weapons.
The combined impact of six neutron antimatter beams fired by each ship of the ten cohorts that made up Ocean Fleet meant each barrage of AM fire consisted of 3,000 antimatter beams. Even allowing for misses as the five clusters moved their ships in spiraling vectors that sought to avoid predictable targets, there was no way any concentration of battleglobes could survive more than a few seconds when in range of his fleet’s antimatter cannons. Already seven battleglobes were turning away and dispersing in all directions, seeking safety in going beyond the range of the fleet’s AM cannons. That would not do.
“Cohort leader Nova,” he mind-called to the AI who directed fifty dreadnought ships. “Have your cohort members Translate out to just beyond the fleeing battleglobes, then take them under fire. Make sure none escape.”
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br /> “Complying,” Nova said in his mind, her mind image that of a female T’Chak dragon who hungered to ‘taste’ the flesh of her prey.
Suzanne appeared in his mind, her curly blond hair framing a face that seemed haggard and bleary-eyed. She gave him a half-smile. “Matthew, there are only seven battleglobes left and they are . . . being hit by the other cohorts of Ocean Fleet. Planet four and the naval base will be within strike range inside of four seconds. Your orders?”
Blinking mentally, he realized that the other members of Hexagon Prime had dispatched every battleglobe in the right-side cluster. Purple plasma globes now preceded their flight vector, clearing away sensorSeeds, tachlink Remotes, Offense sleds and anything made of matter. With seven ships able to dispatch a Plasma Cannon globe every half-second, the space ahead of Hexagon Prime fleet was remarkably clear of nanoware infestation. He smiled back at Suzanne.
“Good lady, thank you for your efforts and those of Lorelei. Let Mata Hari and I pull ahead of the rest of Hexagon Prime and we will take care of the naval base and its host planet,” he said, sharing in mind communion his intentions with the other pilots of Ocean Fleet. “The rest of you may take under fire any Courier vessels, Supply Tubes, comsats and automated Offense sleds. BattleMind and I will handle the base.”
Sarah and her ship Imperial both caught his mental attention. The brown-skinned casino manager fixed her blue eyes on him. “Matthew, there remains a battleglobe that is refueling from the atmosphere processors in orbit about planet five. Shall Imperial and I take care of it?”
Galactic Vigilante (Vigilante Series 3) Page 22
