Matt sat in his Interlock Pit on the Bridge of starship Mata Hari, putting the hope of rescue for his sister and mother in his mind’s background. He must first focus on the upcoming arrival at star system CC3214, an F2V main sequence star that held only three planets, none of them with life on them. While the orange star lay on the main sequence like Earth’s Sol star, this star’s evolution had made it a flare star that regularly scoured the surfaces of its three planets with sterilizing UV and X-ray radiation. The first two planets were airless Mercury analogues, the more distant planet three lay well beyond the liquid water ecozone. Planet three, labeled Stony by the Anarchate, hosted 23,000 lifeforms focused on governing Sector 14. The only sign of life in the system were the clustered domes of the admin HQ and a small Commerce Station in orbit for the rare visits by Anarchate staff and officials. But the large array of Tachyon Pylons near the domes made sure every decision made here was instantly transmitted to every Sector 14 world in Norma, Scutum-Crux, Sagittarius-Carina, Orion, and Perseus arms.
“Matthew,” called Eliana over their shared tachlink node, her pearl white face giving him a smile as she took form in his mind. “The other seven ships of Hexagon Prime are ready for emergence from Translation. Any further guidance beyond the plan we agreed on before we left the heliopause of the Ring Nebula?”
“Nope,” he said, passing on to her a mental love hug. “But it would be nice if you and Suzanne could be on the precog lookout for any Anarchate surprises.”
“Will do.” In his mind her expression looked distracted, then she refocused on him. “Several explosions in the immediate moments are to be seen. Normal for an attack.”
“Good. Now, let us enter ocean-time mode so our actions will be swift and united.”
Matt linked mental hands with Mata Hari as the AI stood to his left in her nearly solid holo, while the giant dragon BattleMind loomed to his right, the AI’s black wings spread wide.
“The Graviton Beamer is at power and ready to reduce the target planet,” BattleMind said lazily, its mental presence buffered from him by Mata Hari.
“Thank you,” Matt said as his mind reached for computer thought speed.
Fourteen milliseconds, 23 nanoseconds, 87 picoseconds and 980 femtoseconds, said his onboard cyberclock.
Space-time changed from the grey of Alcubierre stardrive to a deep black sprinkled with scattered stars. In the distance loomed the blue-green and red double-lobe shape of the Dumbbell Nebula. Closer to hand loomed the planet Stony, its nitrogen atmosphere providing some shielding against energy flares from its orange star. As his mind soaked in the white traces of neutrinos, the dark red of gamma rays, and the purple of ultraviolet flaring out from the local star, his ship senses ‘felt’ the gravitational impact of Stony’s growing immensity as his eight ships hurtled toward it at three-fourths lightspeed. Which was the speed at which he and the other seven cyborgs thought. With FTL tachlink communications between them, their ships and their AI allies were as unified in purpose as any fleet could be.
“TachRemotes, sensorBeads and three Decoy sleds away, Matthew,” said Mata Hari in his mind as the real space imagery disappeared, then reappeared via tachlink transmissions from the hundreds of tiny bots they had seeded ahead of them. “X-ray Picket Globes were present not far from us. They exploded on detection of our gravity waves from Translation emergence. But our sensors recorded only three Nova-class battleglobes in high orbit above planet Stony. Plus a few Courier ships near the station.”
Matt tensed mentally. “Distance to the planet at our speed?”
“One point five seconds.”
“Sufficient.” Matt mentally reviewed their plan, saw no change in the conditions they expected. “Pilots, take out the three battleglobes and the Commerce Station in orbit above Stony. Ben, you and Flowering remove the Commerce Station with your wing antimatter cannons. Eliana and Suzanne, George and Rafael, Sarah and Toktaleen, each of you take out a battleglobe with an AM barrage. No battleglobe can withstand more than three AM beams and each of you can emit six. Hold a few AM cannon loads in reserve for the unexpected.”
Each of his pilots acknowledged his orders even as each ship of the fleet moved off their arrival vectors, then jinked into the barrel roll pattern devised by Suzanne in fleet training at Morrigan. His ship lay at the center of a wheel of seven surrounding ships, acting as the hub for their combined efforts. Since each dragon wing of his ship and the other ships held three antimatter cannons, the hub-in-wheel arrangement allowed the eight of them to fully cover every possible vector in the depth of space. Some of Mata Hari’s cannons would be pointed rearward to take out any battleglobe that sought to materialize behind them via short-range Translation. And while the wrap-around Alcubierre flat shields protected each ship from any kind of matter or energy weapon, it was not an absolute protection. As the larger Ocean Fleet had discovered during the Intel Base battle. Assault Asteroids and antimatter-laden Supply Tube ships had tried to Translate into the normal space-time occupied by each ship within its Alcubierre cocoon. They had lost five ships to those attacks.
Three hundred milliseconds, 142 nanoseconds, 323 picoseconds and 47 femtoseconds, murmured his cyberclock.
About him the inertial field came on to guarantee his body stayed in his seat if there was hard maneuvering that exceeded the adjustment ability of the inertial fields. Similar fields protected the pond, plants and small critters of the Park habitat at the rear of the ship. And since the three freed captives were on other T’Chak Dreadnoughts, he had only himself to worry about.
“Matt,” called Sarah over the tachlink as her brown face loomed in his mind. “My Human captive Gareth Davies wants to do something. He does not understand about ocean-time thinking and battle maneuvers.”
“Put him in sedation and have one of Imperial’s servebots deliver him to the Community Hall and an accel-couch.”
His mind saw Sarah do as he’d ordered. As the former human representative at Omega Casino, she was used to organizing lots of people. This Davies must have done something to get under her skin. At least the Orko and Meligun captives were not bothering Toktaleen. But ahead of Matt the lightspeed images of the three battleglobes showed them moving away from planet Stony and toward his ships, albeit on a spiral vector.
“Everyone! The battleglobes must have seeded tachRemotes in our emergence area. They are moving to intercept us while vectoring away before we can fire at their positions.” Matt’s body swayed ever so slowly in his seat as ship Mata Hari took a sideways move to a new vector angle. “We will be within 100,000 kilometers of Stony very soon. Start firing your AM beams as soon as we hit that range. Try to bracket the likely spots where the battleglobes will be!”
Matt wished the battleglobes were larger than 12 kilometers in size. That would make targeting at the maximum range of the antimatter cannons so much easier. But the Anarchate had never needed to build warships larger than a battleglobe in order to rule the Milky Way for the last two million years. And since the Anarchate ships had the advantage of seeing his ships’ movement in FTL real-time while Hexagon Prime’s targeting depended on slower lightspeed images, their main advantage lay in ship numbers and the ability to blanket a part of space with multiple antimatter beams.
“Firing!” cried Eliana and Suzanne together, their minds so telepathically linked that in battle they operated as one.
“Three beams out!” cried Toktaleen, followed a few milliseconds later by three beams from his ally Sarah.
“Bracketing,” murmured George as he and Rafael both fired at their single battleglobe target.
Nine hundred milliseconds, 12 nanoseconds, 23 picoseconds and 27 femtoseconds, reported his cyberclock.
Soon they were within a quarter light-second of Stony and the battleglobes, which moved hardly at all compared to Matt’s approach at three-fourths lightspeed. But Anarchate laser and AM beams moved at lightspeed. As did theirs.
“A hit!” cried Rafael as Matt’s ship perception saw a blue-white fla
re of total matter-to-energy conversion occur on the southern quadrant of one of the battleglobes.
“Ouch!” cried Ben as two antimatter beams hit his ship Flowering. Their newest pilot was reacting to what his ocean-time perceptions told him was happening, even as his analytical mind said each ship’s Alcubierre shields were soaking up any beam that hit a Hexagon Prime ship. Matt knew that Ben would soon ignore the incoming lasers and AM beams in order to focus on combining his efforts with the mental chessboard that everyone ‘saw’ in their minds thanks to tachlink node sharing.
“Two battleglobes vaporized,” said Mata Hari as she stood beside him in her chainmail top and leather skirt outfit, her sword pointed forward as thousand megawatt red lasers shot out from the two eye nodes of Matt’s ship, their beams passing through a femtosecond-long opening in the shields that instantly closed.
Matt’s mental attention split in scores of segments. Part of him monitored the antimatter output of the twelve fusion power plants that fueled the energies of his ship. Another part of him noted how BattleMind had extruded the Graviton Beamer’s emitter tube, preparing to fire on Stony once they were within 30,000 kilometers of the planet. Several dozen segments of his mind looked outward in a 360 degree perception globe, alert to any stealthed Thermonuke sleds that might try a one-fourth lightspeed run against their ship’s shields, hoping to overload a shield with 30 megaton thermonuclear fusion blasts. Gatekeeper, the AI partner of Mata Hari who’d become as emotional as she, lent his computing power to analysis of the spiraling vector of the last surviving battleglobe, trying to improve the bracket firing by Matt’s own antimatter cannons. With three cannons on the left wing and three on the right wing, plus scores of directed energy domes spotted over the spine of the ship’s dragon shape, Matt did not lack for firepower. The issue was where to fire and when?
“Matt,” called Mata Hari in his mind. “Fire at these locations. Now!”
A quick decision and with a PET thought-image, Matt ordered his AM cannons to fire at three locations selected by Mata Hari. Her mind fed the coordinates to his while his mind fed them directly into the quantum fire control circuits of the cannons. Black beams of coherent neutron antimatter spat out from his three cannons, moving at lightspeed.
“Yes!” cried Eliana and Suzanne simultaneously as their AM beams joined with his to make six hits on the giant battleglobe.
White light flared, then blue-white vapor filled the space where once had been a ship with more than four hundred crew.
“Firing,” growled BattleMind as the eight ships of their wheel-and-hub formation swept to within 30,000 kilometers of planet Stony.
An orange spear of coherent gravitons hit the cluster of silvery domes at the planet’s equator. The domes, seen in normal lightspeed images by Matt, shimmered, grew transparent, then disappeared down a black funnel as all matter on Stony lost the vast spaces between each atom and came together so closely that only the strong atomic force kept the planet’s atoms from collapsing into quarks. Excepting elements with an atomic number greater than lead’s 82. Those elements evaporated into quark-gluon plasmas that Matt had learned would occupy the space-time between a black hole’s singularity and its event horizon.
One second, 112 nanoseconds, 71 picoseconds and 86 femtoseconds, said his internal cyberclock.
“Commerce Station destroyed,” called Ben in an excited voice.
Matt’s attention left behind the marble-sized black hole that had been a planet as large as Venus. His primary attention focused on the puzzling actions of the two Courier vessels, which had streaked away from Stony toward the system’s orange star the moment his ships’ gravity waves registered on Anarchate sensors. While that meant the small ships were only a few seconds closer to the local star than Hexagon Prime fleet, their choice to not go into Translation or to fight his ships puzzled him.
“Mata Hari, how soon before the Courier ships are within AM cannon range?”
“Three seconds Matthew,” she said, her silvery sword reaching beyond the Bridge and slicing apart a Thermonuke sled that had exited stealth and was throwing itself at ship Mata Hari with one-fourth lightspeed acceleration. “The Courier ships are moving at just one-tenth lightspeed. A very fast acceleration from a slow orbital speed. But our ships are overtaking them quickly.”
Why were they fleeing? And toward the local sun at that?
“After them!” snarled BattleMind, the anger in the T’Chak AI’s mind striking Matt like a hurricane snapping through buildings and trees. Even Mata Hari’s mental buffering did not save Matt from milliseconds of disorientation.
Hexagon Prime fleet streaked past planet three and headed into the inner system spaces. In time swift as light, they lay within five AUs of the orange flare star. Their course had been calculated to take the fleet well south of the star, into space below the system’s planetary ecliptic. Matt shook his mind free of BattleMind’s disruption.
“Fire on the—”
“Matt!” cried Suzanne and Eliana both in his mind, their voices preceding any physical image. “Translate! Translate now!”
“Why can’t we—”
“The star is going nova! Translate!” the women cried in the minds of each pilot.
Ahead, the orange corona of the star bulged outward visibly, moving toward them as fast as light.
“Translate!”
Matt and each of his ships diverted all power to entering Alcubierre stardrive. About his ship grew the grey cocoon of Alcubierre space-time, that strange universe-within-a-universe that allowed all starships, Human and Alien, to travel from star to star at large multiples of the speed of light. For within the Alcubierre space-time bubble, the rules of its universe made the outside universe very small. Small enough so that sublight speed within Alcubierre space-time translated into FTL speed in the normal Riemannian space in which stars, galaxies and planets existed.
One second, 323 milliseconds, 67 nanoseconds14 picoseconds and 13 femtoseconds.
“What happened?” he asked as the minds of his pilot battlemates told him via tachlink node that all eight ships were safe in Alcubierre space-time.
Suzanne and Eliana, a blond and an albino, appeared simultaneously in the mindlink they all shared. Gone was the Park grassy field. Only the image of a star billowing out its substance in a lightspeed expansion of its corona filled the background behind them.
“A trap!” Eliana yelled.
“A Courier with a Bethe Inducer weapon onboard lay on the opposite side of the system star,” cried Suzanne, her green eyes filling with tears.
“The ship induced a nova expansion when the two Couriers sped toward the sun,” Eliana said breathlessly. “Must have used a tachlink to alert the ship that was hidden from our view by the star itself. The unseen Courier was lying in wait for anyone who attacked the admin planet.”
Sarah’s blue-eyed gaze filled with alarm. “Ben! He is our newest pilot! It could have gotten him!” she said in the voice tone people used when referring to someone special.
“I’m fine, Sarah,” said the young man who had withstood neurowhip beating from a slaver just before the Intel Base battle. His mind image tipped back his Aussie bush hat.
Matt, feeling the fatigue of still being in ocean-time superfast thinking, put it all together. “Well, Ben, now we know the new battle tactic of the Anarchate. Blow up the system’s star when any T’Chak Dreadnought shows up to attack an Anarchate facility.”
“Matt,” cried Sarah as she brushed at her brunette hair as if she were attending a formal event instead of an informal mind chat. “We have to let the other cohorts of Ocean Fleet know about this! Now! Or they could be caught too close to the local star to enter into Translation!”
Matt blinked. Sarah was right. A minor reason all starships exited Alcubierre space-time at the heliopause of a star was because the closer one came to a star, the greater the gravity field in local space-time. Within a half AU of any star the Alcubierre space-time field could not form, no matter how many fusio
n engines fed it the power to tap into the negative energy of the universe. And this was not the time to allow his attention to be diverted by the signs of Sarah and Ben’s romance.
“Sarah, yes! I’m reaching out to Immovable now!”
He used the tachlink node to reach out thousands of light years in search of the T’Chak AI Immovable. The AI had represented itself and nine other cohort commanders of the 494 ships in Ocean Fleet. Those ships had split into ten cohorts to attack different sectors of the Anarchate. Some cohorts lay on the far side of the galaxy, more than seventy thousand light years away. But the tachyons of tachlinks crossed that distance as if it did not exist.
“Hello, Vigilante Matthew,” came the calm mindvoice of Immovable. “What prompts you to . . . oh! That is an unpleasant new tactic of the Anarchate.”
Matt nodded mentally at the T’Chak dragon who embodied the neuter gender of the organic T’Chak aliens. Immovable’s pink eyes fixed on Matt, then quickly took in the mindshapes of the seven other pilots and their AI companions. “Yes it is! Please share our experience with the commanders of every cohort, and especially with your human and alien co-pilots,” he said. “There will be a need for fast adaptation if any Dreadnought encounters this sneaky use of a Bethe Inducer to overload our Alcubierre defense shields. Any ship touched by a star’s expanding corona would not survive that contact.”
Immovable flexed its black wings, while its yellow-scaled forearms reached out with grasping claws. “Whatever being in the Anarchate devised this new tactic, it is a danger never before used among our perfect masters the T’Chak, nor is this tactic recorded in the public histories of the Anarchate.”
“Matt,” called Eliana from the sidelines. “Will the Anarchate blow up the sun of a system where there is a living world with people?”
Would they?
“Unlikely,” said Toktaleen in Brokeet click-speech. “It would violate the Anarchate’s pledge to not interfere in the internal affairs of any planet. But any sun with only an Anarchate base would be a likely target for this tactic.”
Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) Page 6
