The back of his neck twinged. Mata Hari was reminding him it was time to prepare for leaving Translation.
“Mata Hari,” he said aloud for Eliana’s benefit. “Did you take care of having our guests secured from inertial shock?”
“I did not,” she said.
Matt frowned. “Why not?”
“Because Gatekeeper was tasked by you, as you may recall, with the care, feeding and handling of the refugee humans. I alerted him to the impending exit from Translation. He spread the word of the impending battle and all humans are now secured. Gatekeeper was very careful in his duties.”
Mata Hari’s voice tone carried something extra. Something he had wondered about when Gatekeeper had come aboard while they were orbiting above Omega. “Good. Uh, has Gatekeeper helped you in other ways?”
In his mind Mata Hari’s mind-flow stiffened, suggesting a formality not usually there. “He has been helpful,” she said in a routine voice.
Eliana smiled but kept her attention focused on the sidewall screen that would update with a real-time image of the rock ball’s starships and hulls under construction once they left Translation. Perhaps his lifepartner knew something about Mata Hari and Gatekeeper that only a female understood. Ah well. To battle it was.
With a sigh, Matt reached back, grabbed the optical fiber cable, and plugged it into the receptor implanted in the back of his neck. At cervical vertebrae one level.
Mata Hari could have plugged him in using a servo. But for Matt to take the cable and plug in, using his own muscle power . . . well, symbolism wasn’t limited to organic lifeforms.
He focused, accepting electronic and lightspeed photonic input.
The dam burst as once more he entered ocean-time. Oceans filled him, oceans of machine-fed data filled his mind’s eye. He saw that BattleMind had already opened the Restricted Rooms to his observation, while Mata Hari herself rubbed her mental shoulders against him, acting as the buffering interface he needed to survive being so close to the hurricane thoughts of BattleMind. Matt PET imaged a series of thoughts that Eliana would hear as a buzz of noise while he would mentally image them as words.
“Mata Hari, are the ecofields in the roomsuites backed up with secondary power?”
“Yes, Matthew,” said the mind image of the World War I spy who sported the late Victorian white dress as her persona’s standard appearance. She now took shape as a life-size holosphere between him and Eliana, who looked startled then nodded as she too heard the slow, human-normal alert of impending Translation departure. “Gatekeeper took care of that matter. As we discussed earlier.”
Four hundred milliseconds, ninety-eight nanoseconds, forty-two picoseconds and six femtoseconds, murmured Matt’s onboard timebot.
In his mind there loomed the image of BattleMind the T’Chak dragon, while the mental presence of the starship’s true owner made his mind feel crowded. “Organic Matthew Dragoneaux, do you have any new variations on the Attack Plan we three agreed on earlier?”
The impact of the alien AI’s mind flow was like a cross between a hurricane and a waterfall. Feeling both drenched in its thoughts and battered by their speed, Matt nodded mentally. “One minor change. Rather than turn the rock ball into a small sun using your Sun Glow weapon, I ask that we leave the living quarters of the Anarchate shipyard untouched by weapons fire.”
“Why!” demanded BattleMind impatiently.
Six hundred milliseconds.
Matt felt nausea twist his stomach and his finger joints ached with the residue of rheumatoid arthritis. Eliana’s and Mata Hari’s monoclonal antibodies and epigenetic shutdown proteins had not completely erased the effects of the slow virus.
“To save at least 30,000 of the 42,212 lifeforms that were present on and near the rock ball a month ago,” Matt said, his mind imaging human and alien people living in personal apartments that circled the central Admin dome habitat. “As you saw at Omega, I prefer to destroy only the Anarchate’s offensive starships and fighting personnel.”
He felt BattleMind flap its mental wings, the claws at the forward edge of each wing arcing in imagined ripping of the Anarchate foe. “Saving organic lives is secondary to my Task. What purpose is served by not destroying the entire asteroid and thereby depriving the Anarchate of trained workers?”
“Propaganda,” Matt said quickly, offering a mental image of the galactic tachnet and how rumor, official messages, family messages and vidshows all crossed at FTL speed using the tachyonic network that linked the entire galaxy in a near “real time” communications net. While the tachnet brought word of his attacks to nearby Anarchate globeships, and thus allowed them to arrive while he was still in a system, it also served the trillions of civilian lifeforms who inhabited thousands of planets across the galaxy. “In short, some of the people we leave alive will understand we could have killed them, we did not, and no matter what the Anarchate officials say about our attack, the fact that this ship did so much damage and yet spared lives will spread across the Milky Way galaxy. It will undermine the assumed authority of the Anarchate. Understood?”
“Understood,” grumbled the dragon mind image of BattleMind, its red eyes conveying a look of irritation. “Accepted. Are you prepared for your part in this near-lightspeed assault?”
“He is,” Mata Hari said to BattleMind across their shared mindLink. “And so am I. All twelve fusion power plants are at peak energy output, the directed energy domes are already extruded, and . . . each of your six antimatter pontoons contain magfield reservoirs of neutron antimatter ready for emission upon arrival.”
“Your work was observed by one of my sublinkages and is satisfactory,” said BattleMind, its crocodile mouth opening slightly to reveal very sharp teeth. Though impossible to do for its morphoform, Matt perceived a sense of a ferocious grin. “Now, we begin,” it said, materializing on the Bridge to Matt’s right in its full twelve foot tall shape.
At his left, Eliana began to look startled. Then focused forward. Mata Hari’s holo stared ahead at the front holosphere, which would show all outside combat events at human-normal speed for George and those humans tuned into Channel Seven. In Matt’s mind the lightspeed impulses of various sensors brought the sudden appearance of stars.
They had arrived.
A dragon spread its wings.
One second, imaged Mata Hari.
In his mind, the dragon’s upper body armor was studded with directed energy emitters, while its yellow underbelly glowed with Repulsor energy blocks, laser emitters, tractor and pressor beam installations. Most importantly, the Alcubierre space-time pods located at the starship’s nose, top, bottom and both sides glowed with dark energy. And on both wings there pivoted the six AM pontoon projectors, each one now aimed forward and just picoseconds away from emitting their coherent antimatter beams.
Translation shock battered Matt’s mind, nerves and body as if three tsunamis were battering him. He stayed aware, intent and took in the events taking place at nanosecond intervals.
One second, thirteen nanoseconds.
Suddenly his mind received the current visual image of the shipyard rock ball and those objects orbiting it. They were images just five light minutes old. Very fresh, compared to month-old imagery from the Intelligence dome memory crystal.
Eighteen partially built globeship hulks orbited just a hundred miles above the surface of the rock ball, while three thousand miles out hung five operational Nova-class battleglobes, their twelve-kilometer wide shapes glowing with a pale white glow from the distant star. None of them were moving, but the lightspeed image showed each battleglobe stood at operational readiness, prepared to enter combat in a few seconds. Which, Matt knew from the intelligence crystal, was the required status mode demanded by Combat Command for all its combat vessels. Glinting nearby were three triangular courier vessels, and six large Tube Ships that ID’d as optoelectronic supply vessels, carrying starship devices that could not be made locally. Finally, lying fifty thousand kilometers out were thousands of
x-ray laser Remotes, each a hydrogen bomb ready to explode and emit coherent x-rays at whatever source was identified as its target. A minefield!
One second, twenty-four nanoseconds.
“Matthew,” spoke Mata Hari, “we had not anticipated the minefield. Could it be a new response to our attacks of Combat Command facilities?”
“Probably,” he mind-muttered to his partner, enjoying the sense of mental oneness they now shared. “BattleMind, suggest you add a plasma globe barrage to follow our AM beams as a way of clearing the mines from our entry pathway.”
“Accepted,” said the mental hurricane that battered at Matt’s senses, leaving him shaken in mind. His body would catch up. After all the combat was finished.
One second, fifty-one nanoseconds.
Mentally he blinked as the first six antimatter beams speared out toward the five Anarchate Novas. Matt gave thanks there was no need to compute an orbital track progression for the Novas. Their exit from Translation had put them on a three-quarters lightspeed approach to the rock ball, with the ball’s Admin habitats, living units and Pleasure Dome located in the center of the holosphere even now beginning to take shape at the front of the Bridge. While the hulks orbited slowly, and would require computation of where they would be in five minutes, the five battleglobes were located further out and they remained stationary at geosync. That allowed starship Mata Hari and BattleMind to aim six beams directly at the five ships.
Two seconds, sixty-two nanoseconds.
A second volley of black AM beams shot out from Mata Hari’s wing pontoons, their trajectory shifted slightly to allow for a circular dispersion outward by the battleglobes, assuming their visual detection of Mata Hari allowed them any action after the simultaneous arrival of the first six AM beams. Matt mind-blinked, reminding BattleMind of the need to emit purple plasma globes from the ship’s two kilometer-long axial accelerator to take out the minefield Remotes.
“Already done, small organic!” snarled BattleMind as a tiny thread of its awareness responded to his slow mind-probe.
Matt’s mind filled with the image of a snarling crocodile mouth opening a round orifice and spitting forth the purple flame of a two hundred meter-wide plasma globe, its contents held together by a charged field that kept the plasma from dissipating into vacuum. A second plasma globe followed the first. Then, with the mind-sound of a lion’s roar, the third plasma globe burst out from the nose of Mata Hari. Each globe filled one apex of a triangular zone that would be wiped clean of any x-ray laser Remotes.
Three seconds, twenty-five nanoseconds.
His vision blurred briefly as the forward Alcubierre space-time field placed its grey flatness between the starship and anything that might lie between them and the rock ball. Identical fields took shape top, bottom and to either side of starship Mata Hari. But it was inside the ship that true weapons of stellar destruction came online.
Matt’s mind sped up, seeing things in picosecond and femtosecond intervals.
The room that shimmered with neutrinos and felt slightly out-of-time contained the Sun Glow emitter that could turn a planet into a miniature sun of magnetically contained plasma clouds. While BattleMind had agreed to not turn the rock ball into a brief ball of sun plasma, it was clear the alien AI hoped to use the Sun Glow against some other target.
Next to the neutrino room glowed the Graviton Beam with yellow hellishness, its coherent gravitons able to turn any solid object into a tiny black hole. Matt shivered, thinking of the warped space-time that was contained in a space that occupied one-fourth of the lower belly of Mata Hari. It took four fusion reactors to supply adequate energy flow to the Sun Glow and Graviton rooms.
Just beyond them lay the initiator for the axial plasma funnel accelerator, its magcoils occupying the central core of the starship. And at the opposite end of the starship bulked the orange glow of the Bethe Inducer, a device able to turn any solid object into a few particles of neutron star, or to make any star go nova in less than a second. The Bethe Inducer and the neutron antimatter beamers were the strongest weapons possessed by the Anarchate, but were second-level for Mata Hari.
What no one else but the T’Chak aliens possessed were the central ring of Alcubierre space-time pods that could project an Alcubierre pocket universe as a flat sheet of altered, different space-time, a sheet that shunted any energy beam or solid matter weapon into another part of the universe. After first collapsing any matter into a centimeter thick sheet of metal, electronics and squishy organic residue. The shunting aside of all offensive weaponry was the perfect defense field for Mata Hari. It absorbed all matter and energy attacks, while randomly opening brief holes in the space-time sheets for Mata Hari’s own weapons to blast away at the enemy.
Three seconds, twenty-six nanoseconds said the mind speech of Mata Hari.
Seeing their attack plan unfold in synchrony with the AI mind-fields of Mata Hari and BattleMind was a little like watching an old-time, antique computer simulation, one that children had loved to play using handheld datapads. The “games” were oh-so-pretty simulations of starships battling one another, of combat suited humans fighting aliens, and colonists landing triumphantly on a new world that would be their colony home. Or so Matt had read during his self-schooling when he worked as a stevedore aboard an alien starship. The true reality of life under the heel of a galactic culture run by ruthless aliens was barely touched in the imagery he had viewed briefly. And none of them had caught the mental pain of a neurowhip, a sensory flagellation device that one’s job Master wielded with a precision that input agony but did not cause you to pass out. A bondServant who passed out too often was usually discarded, like so much rubbish or stellar debris.
Three seconds, four hundred nanoseconds, nine picoseconds and three femtoseconds.
Following after the purple plasma globes came coherent lightspeed beams emitted by the ship’s carbon dioxide, neutral particle, excimer, proton and excimer lasers, each laser burst aimed at one of 18 hulls still abuilding in low orbit above the rock ball. They quickly passed by the one-third lightspeed plasma balls. Matt’s biceps felt the launch of much slower KKMs. The kinetic kill missiles each carried a three megaton bomb, a hundred thousand onboard nanoshells, white noise emitters, Seek-Identify sensors, three holo Decoys or thousands of tachRemotes that would spread out ahead of them and allow FTL detection and alerting to incoming lightbeam and solid weapons. While the Anarchate also possessed dedicated tachRemotes, they had not been launched yet since the base only knew a starship had arrived at the scheduled time at the expected location, thanks to the FTL gravity waves that were picked up instantly after any starship’s emergence from Alcubierre Drive Translation.
Four seconds, seven femtoseconds.
Six new neutron antimatter beams shot forth, this time aimed at the six largest hulls under construction by the rock ball crews. A second volley of six beams followed a few picoseconds later, aiming for the next group of hulls, while powerful proton beam blisters shot 50,000 megawatt beams at the six remaining hulls, leaving only the surface installations for targeting. Matt sighed internally, letting go of BattleMind’s superfast mind imagery. He could take only a short linkage with the T’Chak AI before mental exhaustion hit him. And they had most of four minutes left before the final light minute of their closing approach happened and they learned what counteraction the Anarchate vessels and AIs had done upon optical detection of their non-Anarchate shape.
Four seconds, nine hundred nanoseconds said Mata Hari, her attention mostly focused on activating the belly Repulsor blocks so as to move the starship off of its incoming vector, in anticipation of some kind of counterfire from the Anarchate battleglobes.
Five seconds said a smiling Mata Hari, as if she understood and accepted his organic limitations.
“Matt,” began Eliana, speaking so slowly his onboard nanobyte datacubes had to accelerate her acoustic words into mind-talk that Matt would comprehend. “We’re shooting black beams and orange flares and purple balls and�
�”
She said no more in the brief five seconds perceived by her organic eyes and mind. Matt focused on the surface installations on the rock ball, mentally noting targets for Mata Hari’s laser blisters. He spoke aloud, relying on Mata Hari to transmit the proper mind-imagery to BattleMind.
“BattleMind, leave the Tachyon Pylon intact so the survivors can call for help and also spread word of our attack,” Matt said in PET thought-imagery. “Take out the six carbon dioxide laser mounts that surround the landing field. You could put a small antimatter beam into the center of the Admin habitat dome. The crater from total matter-to-energy conversion will not extend to the living quarters on the outer ring of the base. Uh, and allocate two AM beams at that courier ship which is moving outsystem and aiming for the open space between the asteroid belt and planet four. It’s probably a normal courier departure, but I do not want it to Translate before we finish here.”
“Understood. Acting,” came the hailstone mind-reply of BattleMind as the AI did as Matt asked, took in every source of radiation now impacting on their location, the locations of small to large asteroids even though millions of kilometers separated each asteroid from its closest neighbor, the distance to their exit point from the asteroid field after combat, the exact calculations for in-system Translation if that seemed wise, the hours later coordinates for a heliopause Translation, the activation of a backup Alcubierre space-time sheet lying just behind the primary sheet since BattleMind had not just repaired the burned out space-time node, but had built a second node in case of overload, and thousands of other datastreams from dozens of source points.
Matt winced in mind, and later in body, as his lightspeed senses shivered from the impact of BattleMind’s mind-flow. Beside him, her mind as close to his as if they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, Mata Hari gave him a sympathetic look along with a thumbs-up encouragement signal.
Vigilante Series 2: Nebula Vigilante Page 11
