Vigilante Series 2: Nebula Vigilante

by T. Jackson King

  NEBULA VIGILANTE

  Book Two of the Vigilante Series

  By T. Jackson King

  King Novels

  Galactic Vigilante (forthcoming), Nebula Vigilante (2013), Star Of Islam (2013), Galactic Avatar (2013), Stellar Assassin (2013), Retread Shop (2012, 1988), Star Vigilante (2012), The Gaean Enchantment (2012), Little Brother’s World (2010), Judgment Day And Other Dreams (2009), Ancestor’s World (1996).

  Dedication

  To my son, Keith Eric King, Special Agent, Office of Special Investigations, USAF (ret.), who put his life on the line daily during three combat tours in the Middle East and in many other countries around the world which cannot be named due to security considerations.

  Acknowledgments

  First thanks go to my wife Cathy, who served as First Reader on this novel. Other First Readers who helped include Mia McLeod and Alicia Solomon. Finally, the military SF stories of David Drake, a true veteran of a major war, have been the inspiration for this and other Vigilante sequels.

  NEBULA VIGILANTE

  © 2013 T. Jackson King

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

  Cover design by T. Jackson King; cover image by Luca Oleastri via Dreamstime license; back image of Carina Nebula, courtesy of Hubble Space Telescope

  Published by T. Jackson King, Los Alamos, NM 87544

  www.sff.net/people/t-jackson-king

  ISBN 10: 978-1-61720-659-7

  ISBN 13: 1-61720-659-8

  Printed in the USA

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR T. JACKSON KING’S BOOKS

  CHAPTER ONE

  The nuke-tipped rocket roared out of Matt’s backpack into the grey sky that overhung the Anarchate Intelligence dome in the middle of a brown desert cut by blue-shadowed arroyos. Its launch broke Suit’s stealth camouflage and alerted the patrolling Guardian in a green combat suit that an intruder needed its attention.

  Matt PET imaged the ten steps of his attack plan to Suit’s Tactical CPU, then blinked his right eye to launch Nanoware rocket shells from both biceps to smother the alien’s suit perceptions with electronic white noise, while titanium darts loaded with neurotoxin biogel sped toward the ten-legged form that resembled a stumpy centipede. Its globular helmet sheltered six eyes from the high UV of the local yellow-white F5 star. Its flowing motion over the desert sands began to change.

  Ocean-time filled Matt’s senses as his cyborg combat suit and inbuilt modifications moved him into direct symbiosis with Suit and with his orbiting Dreadnought-class starship Mata Hari, thanks to a tachyon-based comlink. Femtoseconds moved like minutes while picoseconds slowly accumulated and a second seemed like hours away. Matt thought faster than a normal human.

  Action plans initiated, said Suit via his PET sensors.

  His backpack vibrated again as a napalm rocket flamed out toward the Guardian, which thankfully was not a cyborg with lightspeed reflexes. A third rocket arced sideways toward the Anarchate dome, aiming to flood its inner air space with Knockout gases suitable for all oxy-nitro breathing critters. A fourth and final rocket moved toward the dome’s Tachyon Pylon, aiming to cut off any call by the dome’s AI for Anarchate help.

  Putting his gauntleted right hand over the rim of the arroyo Matt fired all five fingertip lasers at the Guardian, knowing that its own suit would flare away the 30 megawatt beams using adaptive optics coatings similar to Suit’s outer coating. But even an automated response by the alien’s combat suit would briefly focus its tunable sapphire crystals to frequencies different from that emitted by his two shoulder laser pulse-cannons. He lifted his right shoulder above the arroyo rim, putting the cannon’s nose into sensor detection by the alien. He thought-fired the cannon.

  A hundred megawatts of green laser fire instantly crossed the hundred meters separating Matt and the Guardian, bypassing the slower Nanoshells and rockets the way a hypersonic jet passes by a subsonic transport. The Guardian’s globe helmet glared yellow and began to blacken. Then its body twisted to put its laser reflective combat suit skin between his cannon’s blaze and the weaker helmet globe.

  Little flares spotted its green suit as the alien launched its own Nanoshells and penetrator darts at Matt, all while its own onboard CPU revved up to Defense Mode from its routine Patrol status. Photonic and electronic systems within the Guardian’s suit were as efficient as Matt’s own Suit systems, but still they lagged by long milliseconds behind Matt’s sudden assault.

  “Mata Hari, launch the HVMs at the Guardian,” he thought-spoke to his AI partner on board their stealth-shielded Dreadnought via tachyon comlink.

  “Complying, Matthew,” came a feminine voice in his mind, the order and reply taking less than a dozen picoseconds.

  Overhead, the orbiting Dreadnought left stealth and spat three hypervelocity missiles down at the Guardian, their onboard CPUs relying on reentry plasma heat to deflect any laser fire by the single alien patrolling the perimeter of the Anarchate Intelligence dome. They approached at planetary escape velocity, a threat that would distract the Guardian at least briefly.

  Would his life partner Eliana be at the ship’s Interlock Pit watching via the holo globe what was happening around him? Would she be worried for him? She did love him, that he knew. She had given up life on her planet Halcyon and among her fellow Greek settlers and the Derindl tree-dwelling aliens with whom the Third Wave settlement interbred thanks to neonatal placental units, producing crossbreeds like Eliana.

  She would see more than he saw, being onboard the Dreadnought. She would feel the ship’s flexmetal skin shiver as it launched decoy drones against the eventual arrival of an Anarchate Nova-class battleglobe, see the pink of the proton beams that were even now destroying the geosync comsats that allowed the few Anarchate outposts on this desert planet to communicate with each other, and shiver as a coherent neutron antimatter beam shot down and vaporized the Tachyon Pylon that was the dome’s solitary FTL comlink to other Anarchate stars.

  His mind count tracked five hundred milliseconds since he’d launched the three kiloton nuke rocket. Half a second. Though he thought faster than any organic, Matt’s starship weapons could only move at slow normal matter speeds—excepting the lasers and neutron beam that were lightspeed. Would it cut off any FTL signal from the dome’s self-aware AI?

  Mata Hari the Dreadnought could have easily destroyed the entire Intelligence dome with a similar AM beam. But that was not what he had proposed to BattleMind, the controlling AI mind that overhung his and Eliana’s lives and which had created the Mata Hari persona to interact with “normal” organics during its Task to evaluate the Anarchate military strength before its masters, the T’Chak aliens of the Small Magellanic Cloud, invaded the Milky Way and took control of an anci
ent galactic culture focused on maintaining star to star anarchy . . . the Anarchate.

  Matt had convinced BattleMind he could land, sneak up on the dome, disable or destroy its Guardian, and then make entry to recover the dome’s backup molecular memory crystal with its encrypted data on Anarchate battleglobes, regional naval bases, shipyards and fuel depots. All matters which the T’Chak masters would need for their planned invasion. A plan that was 207,000 years old, made by a species everyone in home galaxy believed to be long dead. Except for the Dreadnought starships with BattleMind AIs like Mata Hari. BattleMind planned to return home to its masters, once it had gained enough combat, sigint and humint intelligence about the Anarchate. And Matt’s purpose was to delay that departure by arranging “combat lessons” for an alien-made AI that thought itself the peak of inorganic intelligence. Maybe so, maybe not. But sneaky it was not.

  Dismissing the milliseconds long review of how he had come to be hidden in an arroyo just beyond the Intelligence dome of the Anarchate, Matt PET image-thought to Suit and rose up on the Nullgrav plates of his boots. Time to face his enemy. Time to distract it long enough for the nuke-tipped rocket to reach its programmed location. Time for . . .

  # # #

  T’Pok the Guardian registered the intruder’s appearance above the arroyo rim, his forebrain registering surprise before his own suit CPU tasked several suit combat systems to attack the impertinent alien.

  Three spinal ridge laser cannons fired green beams at the intruder, while bellypaks discharged Fire-and-Forget rocket shells with onboard neurotoxins, acids able to vaporize metal and automated energy-blockers that would disrupt the control impulses of his opponent, once they reached the outer skin of the intruder’s combat suit.

  An intense yellow glow took form in front of the two-legged monstrosity that thought itself intelligent as T’Pok’s pressor beam emitters swept the space between them, causing the incoming rocket shells to vaporize, producing the yellow haze. But his spinal laser cannons impacted the alien’s suit even as his own suit’s adaptive optics sapphire crystals reflected away the five small laser beams that had preceded his own strike. Thinking as quickly as he could, in neurolink with his suit’s weapons and defense systems, T’Pok activated Defense Attack Mode Streble Three.

  But the yellow beam of the intruder’s two shoulder laser pulse-cannons arrived even as his spinal lasers shifted frequencies as they tried to overcome the opponent’s adaptive optics outer suit skin.

  “Oooof,” his mind muttered as his right side breathing sphincters felt sudden heat as the green lasers vaporized his optical crystals and blackened the ceramic armor of his suit.

  T’Pok had quickly detected the four rockets launched by the intruder, but chose to ignore all of them except for the one headed at him. Shifting one spinal laser mount he mind-fired at the swiftly approaching rocket, causing a flaming ball to appear halfway between him and the intruder. The flame ball vaporized his second wave of rocket shells that had been launched by his suit’s onboard Tactical CPU.

  Ignoring the high rocket that shot off course to a point behind him, he alerted the dome’s Point Defense Emitters to activate and defend against the two rockets headed for it. But one rocket had already fragmented into thousands of small beads that had spread out too much to be destroyed. T’Pok left the remaining rocket to the dome’s AI and the PDEs. He had troubles of his own that required his analysis if he was to survive the next few minims of combat.

  T’Pok’s combat suit neurolink activated his own pressor emitters and shot four powerful beams at the intruder, aiming to knock the alien far away from him and the dome. If he succeeded, long range sabot shells would keep the alien busy until he could activate a Defense sled from within the dome. If he . . .

  Matt’s onboard CPU automatically deployed his own pressor beams to meet the Guardian’s counterattack with pressor beams, pushing the yellow mist and roiling napalm flames towards the centipede alien.

  One second had passed since Matt’s rocket launches and laser strikes. He smiled as his helmet SitRep holo showed a few of his Fire-and-Forget rocket shells had hugged the sandy ground, escaping the alien’s suit defense and pressor field. Perhaps they would impact the alien’s suit with nanoborers and white noise emitters, thus gaining him a tactical advantage in this lightspeed combat.

  The alien’s three green laser beams impacted the chest and legs of Suit, causing the adaptive optics sapphire layer to resonate to each frequency of the three attacking lasers. But as the attacking beams moved over Suit’s surface, the crystals did not adjust quickly enough to stop the lasers from penetrating to the black ablative layers of Suit. The layers could withstand the heat of reentry from orbit, a heat similar to the coherent megawatt lightbeams now scoring Suit. With a PET thought-image Matt set Suit into a fast vortex spin-in-place, thereby removing the laser beams’ ability to concentrate penetrative heat in one place. He breathed quickly, glad the beams had not reached the ceramic armor under the ablative skin, let alone the exoskeleton components that lay between his naked skin and Suit’s inner surface. The pressor emitters of his helmet flashed around him, deflecting the alien’s rocket shells that sought impact on Suit.

  With his shoulder laser pulse-cannons shifting laser frequencies to achieve the same burn-through effect on the Guardian’s combat suit, Matt’s neurolinked right hand fired the Magnum laser rifle he held, even as his left hand’s fingertip lasers sought punch-through for steel, chitin flesh and fluid vaporization. Image-thinking again, he unleashed the waist-level ultrasonic vibers to work against the alien’s combat suit, hoping for a disruption of the spinal laser mountings.

  One point five seconds had passed since the launch of the nuke-tipped rocket. A hundred more milliseconds and Matt would drop below the arroyo rim, his combat distraction effort hopefully having worked. Assuming, of course, he survived that long.

  T’Pok shuddered as one of the intruder’s laser pulses bit into his middle spinal laser mount, newly weakened by ultrasonic beams that easily passed through his pressor fields. Electric pain hit him as three chitin segments flashed to vapor when his suit’s crystal deflection failed. Twisting his long, low body to shelter the spinal wound, T’Pok felt the first touch of fear. The first realization that he, a Guardian Second Class, with fifteen life cycles of combat action for the Anarchate, wearing a Thix model Level One combat suit, might fail in his defense of the Intelligence dome. Might even die . . .

  Two seconds had passed for Matt. Time to drop down into the arroyo. Time to fully submerge into ocean-time as Suit’s automated expert programs fought incoming rocket shells, shrapnel produced by the alien’s own HEDS shells, and deflected laser beams of multiple changing frequencies. The alien still had two working spinal lasers and fought hard, the lasers taking down the three HVMs as they exited the plasma plume of decel. It moved its physical body to protect the spinal area where his pulse-cannon had punched through the combat suit’s shell to vaporize actual flesh. Counting himself lucky his spin-in-place had shielded him long enough to gain a slight advantage, Matt thought-activated his leg tractor beams and pulled himself below the direct sight of the Guardian alien.

  Course, its own SpyEye floater globe hung a hundred meters above him, sending a clear three dee image of Matt and Suit back to the alien’s Tactical CPU with its own automated Defense and Attack algorithms. But the suddenness of Matt’s attack and his positron emission tomography neurolinking and thinking exceeded that of any known human or alien combat suit. Thinking faster made survival more likely.

  Two point five seconds had passed since launch. Any moment now. Matt hoped the rock of the arroyo and Suit’s own armor would protect him. He hoped . . .

  T’Pok barely blinked at the sudden disappearance of the intruder below the rim of the arroyo. Silly, stupid alien. His SpyEye floater imaged the intruder in a holo easily visible to any of his six eyes. His three-lobed brain was adaptable, as his need to coordinate ten legs in syncopation required a single lobe for movement. The o
ther two were highly analytical and survival focused. While his combat suit lacked the rocket backpack of the intruder, it did link directly to the dome’s Defense CPU. Thinking in specific alpha wave patterns, T’Pok caused the launch of three solid fuel rockets from the dome, even as a distant part of his mind noted the alien’s rocket beads had penetrated the dome, spread a Knockout mist that had disabled his fellow organics, leaving only the dome AI in working mode, albeit distracted by white noise emitters the intruder’s rocket had sown among the gas beads. He felt victory approaching as the Anarchate rockets fired out of vertical launch tubes.

  Streaking into the blue sky, T’Pok thought-imaged the intruder’s location coordinates to the mini-minds of the rocket shells, hoping the alien’s shoulder lasers would keep firing at his suit’s crystal-lined outer skin, the deflection frequencies changing faster than he could think. But that was what automated expert systems were for. To conduct simple tasks like suit defense. Attack options required an organic mind allied to suit’s Tactical CPU. Thinking vengeful thoughts, T’Pok did not notice the intruder’s high elevation rocket shell had reached a point behind him that placed T’Pok directly between the intruder and the rocket shell.

  Vengeance would be—

  A three kiloton nuclear fission warhead detonated a kilometer behind T’Pok, its plasma fireball a miniature sun that emitted first a burning light that bathed his suit in thermal heat, then a whipping wind that would eventually pass him with a hurricane force. But before the blast wind reached him, the worst effect of the nuke occurred.

  An electromagnetic pulse aura burst out from the fireball, irradiating T’Pok’s suit with EMF saturation in levels so strong it burned out his suit electronics, blinded his photonic systems, and scrambled his onboard Tactical CPU since lightspeed neutrons cannot be deflected by pressor beams or magfields. While the thermal heat pulse would not fry him, T’Pok was suddenly blind, deaf, limited to his own thoughts, and unable to activate any suit systems, including his lasers and pressor emitters. Overhead, the three dome rockets exploded from the EMP effect.