Five picoseconds
, said Mata Hari.
Inside
his mind and overwhelming his sense of self there glowed the giant image of BattleMind, its persona that of an avenging demon sent by its master to punish those who would oppose any wish of the T’Chak Imperium.
Three femtoseconds
, said Mata Hari.
Black space blossomed before them.
Stars sparkled like white diamonds. The G3 yellow star known as CC4137 glowed in the lower left of Matt’s mind vision, while the red-orange atmosphere of Megadeen occupied right of center. Around the moon hung
four
Nova battleglobes, ten couriers and a frontline string of Remotes loaded with megaton-level thermonuclear bombs, according to radiation emitted by them. They had fifty milliseconds before the gravity wave pulse of their emergence struck the battleglobe AIs, followed by the light waves of their physical shape. Time to fight.
Matt PET thought-imaged a command to the AM pontoons and six black beams of coherent neutron antimatter sped out and through the sheet of Alcubierre space-time that preceded them. Two of the beams would impact directly on two of the battleglobes, while four others would immediately destroy four courier spaceships that happened to be on the vector line of those pontoons. Fast as mentally possible, Matt sent a near lightspeed PET command to the axial plasma gun to fire three purple plasma globes on a side-by-side horizontal front, counting on them to remove small Remotes and more vitally, the megaton destruct devices that clearly some survivor of their earlier battles had learned could overload
Mata Hari’s
forward Alcubierre field. Giving thanks that BattleMind had replaced the old installation with two to create an underlying Alcubierre space-time sheet in case the top one overloaded, Matt told his spine and sidewall lasers to emit beams aimed at the four battleglobes and the other couriers.
“Faster!” snarled BattleMind as its primary attention focused on the S
un Glow weapon and also on the Graviton Beam room to serve as a backup since they now faced twice the defensive force they had expected.
Ten milliseconds
, said Mata Hari as she fed new antimatter flow to the pontoons.
Matt thought as fast as he could. Angling the six pontoons to focus on the two
outer battleglobes that even now were receiving their gravity wave pulse, with a likely CPU AutoDefense reaction that would move them away from each other, Matt told two pontoons to aim toward the outer edge of the outermost battleglobes, betting that slow fusion pulse or Repulsor power would not move the battleglobes far enough to escape his incoming antimatter beams. With a thought the pontoons fired a second barrage. Picoseconds later the axial accelerator fired three plasma globes in quick succession. Thinking as fast as possible, Matt ordered the six pontoons to fire a third, follow-up barrage at the first two battleglobes, which should be twelve-kilometer wide hulks of smoking, outgassing and flaring debris by the time they were hit by his follow-on barrage.
Fourteen milliseconds.
Their arrival distance of twenty thousand kilometers from the Megadeen moon shrank to half that before the Anarchate counterfire impacted their Alcubierre shields.
Six black antimatter beams hit their forward Alcubierre shield, while two from an outlying battleglobe missed them completely. The white, yellow, green and purple flares of incoming excimer, ne
utral particle, carbon dioxide, free electron, proton, and hydrogen fluorine lasers hit their front field, disappearing into another space-time. Ahead of them the three purple plasma globes plowed through the picket line of nuke-loaded Remotes, clearing a vector wider than their ship for their passage to one side of Megadeen moon. But off to the right and left sides of Matt’s vision field glowed the nuclear spheres of Offense Remotes as the automated devices shot coherent x-rays at them, based on tachlink Fire commands from the CPUs of the four battleglobes.
Five hundred milliseconds
, whispered Mata Hari.
The image of the opposing forces changed suddenly as the light glow of weaponry hits spread in all directions, including back to starship
Mata Hari.
The two central Nova battleglobes showed as flaring hulks with half their mass lost to Matt’s two incoming AM beams. The beam impacts had
bitten deep into the inner habitat zone of each globe, scattering debris, tiny bodies and exploding nuclear reactors in all directions. It was clear his follow-on AM beams would finish the job since the two hulks showed no maneuvering.
One second,
Mata Hari said.
Time for organics to take over from the CPUs.
The right side battleglobe had been hit dead center as it moved slowly outward and into the vector of his second AM barrage. It had broken up into three pieces of half the original mass. It too showed no ability to move. With a thought Matt fired his right wing’s three AM pontoon
s at the remains of the right side battleglobe, aiming to finalize its death.
But the left side battleglobe was unhit. It had used fusion pulse and Repulsor power to move
upward
, away from their incoming vector. The black AM beam he’d aimed at it passed harmlessly to one side. Some of the follow-on laser beams were impacting it, but with armor half a kilometer thick the Anarchate Nova was firing its own antimatter beams at the forward vector position that
Mata Hari
would shortly occupy. Strangely, it also showed the space-time shimmer of its Bethe Inducer starting up. Surely it knew that their Alcubierre fields would soak up the Anarchate’s premier weapon?
He blinked mentally, recalling the other event that caused a space-time shimmer.
“Translation now!” he screamed to Mata Hari and BattleMind, who was just milliseconds away from firing the Sun Glow weapon. “Now! Translate
now
!”
The space before him, with its images of exploding starships, plasma globes and laser beams filling the
vacuum before them, disappeared. The grey blackness of the starship’s Alcubierre Drive field enveloped them. Matt gave a mental sigh.
“
WHY!
” screamed the mind voice of BattleMind as it reacted to the loss of its ability to vaporize Megadeen.
Even Mata Hari’s buffering presence was not enough. “Exit in one second,” he said mentally, his thought words blurring together. “Behind the moon. Vaporize it. Then destroy the battleglobe that just Translated to where we would have existed on our incoming vector.”
Matt passed out.
He felt Eliana’s warm hand on his neck even as wetness cooled his brow. Matt became aware he was out of
ocean-time
. And free of the hurricane assault from BattleMind’s mental energies. Where were they? Had they finished the mission? Had they—
“Matthew, it’s all okay,” said the calm voice of Eliana. “Open our eyes slowly. You’re still in the Pit, but all is
done now. We are in Translation headed for the Magellanic Stream.”
Matt opened his eyes. Then his mind filled with the normal senses he perceived when in the Pit and linked to Mata Hari and the starship. By way of optical neurolinking he felt the outer skin of
Mata Hari
, the emptiness of the pocket universe created by the Alcubierre space-time stardrive, and the smooth operation of all twelve fusion power plants. There did not seem to be any damage to their home. And thankfully, the mental blowtorch of BattleMind was absent.
“Hey there,” he said looking up to Eliana’s white face and ebony black hair as it fell over her shoulders and tickled his nose.
Eliana’s face showed relief, then her eyes fixed on him, sending a sense of love heart-deep that made him shudder internally. “Welcome back, dear Matt. Our friend Mata Hari was worried for you. But she and BattleMind did as you told them to do just after you passed out. The moon is gone. The surviving battleglobe is a tiny black hole thanks to the Graviton Beam used by BattleMind. We are now on our way out of Anarchate space and into the distant unknown of space beyond our galactic plane.”
Matt marveled at Eliana’s lengthy status update, then realized she spoke from relief that he had not been brain damaged by BattleMind’s angry scream. He looked aside and saw his new friends George and Suzanne looking at him with concern. Beside them stood the country gentleman holo of Gatekeeper, who held han
ds with a shy-looking Mata Hari. His AI friend wore a summer dress similar to that which Suzanne had worn on Morrigan. It seemed all four of his friends were happy to see him back healthy and mentally sound, even if not wealthy. He chuckled at the old childhood rhyme that had given rise to his semantic word-play.
“What?” asked Eliana as she dribbled some water onto the cloth that covered his brow.
“Just recalling a rhyme from my early childhood. What really matters is seeing the four of your, safe. Safe! I was so worried when I realized the battleglobe captain intended to Translate to where we
would be
in an effort to overload our Alcubierre fields with his Translation field emergence. A high tech version of the old seaborne tactic of ramming the enemy ship.”
Mata Hari nodded his way. “A valuable memory, Matthew. Neither I nor BattleMind would have thought of that battle tactic.” She walked over to kneel beside Eliana, her black eyes reaching deep into him, as deep as the green glow of Eliana’s eyes. “To use the Translation drive to ram another starship, within a star system, using your own ship to destroy it along with yourselves, is something never recorded in Anarchate annals.”
He blinked. Now that he thought about it, that tactic was something he’d only discovered while reading the naval tales of a human writer, someone named Patrick O’Brian. The tales were on a part of his personal datapad that he used for entertainment, in those rare moments when he wasn’t working. Well, maybe BattleMind would count it as part of his human ‘sneakiness’ quota.
“What of the Megadeen system? Any ships left?”
“Nothing is left,” Mata Hari said, standing up and growing serious in her look.
“Nothing?”
Eliana shook her head. “Nothing. BattleMind was so ticked off at the attempt by the battleglobe to destroy
him
that, after using the Sun Glow to vaporize the moon and the Graviton Beam to turn the battleglobe into a tiny black hole, it Translated to within an AU of the G3 star. It fired its Bethe Inducer beam at the star, causing its stellar atmosphere to begin collapsing into a pre-nova stage. We Translated out before its final blowup.”
“Uh, what about our captive Meligun? Was he dropped off somewhere?”
“Not yet,” Mata Hari said. “There is
nothing
remaining in that star system that was not either vaporized or fatally irradiated by the nova we caused. Any surviving ship’s personnel are dead now, or were dead within minutes after the nova blew. I made the decision to keep him in the roomsuite, even though BattleMind wished to offload the Meligun within range of the nova blast.”
“Thank you, dear partner,” Matt said. Interesting what happens when you tick off a T’Chak. “Uh, can someone bring me a steak? I’m feeling really hungry.”
They all laughed. Together, he and Eliana, George and Suzanne, and Gatekeeper and Mata Hari, they had survived the last battle with the Anarchate. Now they would spend weeks, perhaps a month, onboard
Mata Hari
until they had their first emergence in the Magellanic Stream. Surely they would find peace there. No one lived in the stream of neutral hydrogen gas. And only the dead now occupied the Small Magellanic Cloud. Yes, peace would reign for a space of time aboard their home. Even if that peace was constrained to an alternate space-time.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Suzanne stood outside the roomsuite containing the Meligun bear merchant who had loudly proclaimed himself as Rak tho-mesk of Clan Klickjo. The alien who’d been a manager of Trans-Galactic had become more of a bother over the three weeks since they’d left the Galifray system. It seemed to expect a delivery of itself to some Anarchate world where the ‘proper’ commercial authorities would see to its needs. Well, she was trying to quiet its outrage with a tray of Sargun sweets that she’d grabbed from the commissary’s Food Alcove. Maybe the sweets and the mug of red Halikakis wine would placate its temper. She hoped so. They were within hours of dropping out of Translation to seek fuel in the Magellanic Stream. Holding the tray in her left hand, she touched the Admit patch with her right.
“Hello, Manager Rak tho-mesk of the eminent Clan Klickjo!
” she said, wishing she had not volunteered to take over this duty from Gatekeeper. “Here are some sweets and wine to brighten your day.”
The Meligun bear looked up from its
datapad. The black-furred bear fixed its two pink eyes on her, twitched elf-like ears, sat back to cross one hairy leg over another, then folded both pairs of muscular arms over its chest. The posture was one of imperial patience with a lesser lifeform.
“BondServant Suzanne, your attention to the necessities is appreciated,” it said in a growl of Belizel that her comlink instantly translated to English Standard. “The Halikakis wine is last cycle’s vintage, but the Sargun sweets are always in season.” It accepted the tray from her and laid it on a floor-extruded table next to its
cushion chair. Then it gestured around the room, as if the openness of the room, which held more space than three Omega apartments, was an insult. “The spa basin of this environment is once again deficient in its proper temperature, while the musical choices are best suited for Meligun bondServants such as yourself. Are there no other entertainments available?”
She winced. The Meligun had been complaining about the variable heat temperature of the room’s spa basin ever since awakening from its Knockout sleep. While the flexmetal of the starship had adapted the floor to whatever style of bed platform, lighting and fresher facilities the alien desired, it seemed that hot water which was one degree Kelvin off of its preferred temp was an insult to its august persona. While she had
seen more demanding aliens while working at Omega, she had usually had other aliens she could assign to coping with their complaints. No such luck now.
“Well, we could replace it with a sand bath? That way any temp variation could be adjusted by yourself, using hot stones,” she said with a slight smile.
“Sand!” it moaned. “Only our prehistoric ancestors made use of such primitive bath modes. It’s been millennia since—”
“I’m sure it has,” Suzanne interrupted. “And regarding new entertainments, we will shortly be emerging from Translation into a part of the Magellanic Stream that is close by the south pole of home galaxy. If you adjust your wallscreen to a north polar view you will
see the central bar of our galaxy in all its colorful majesty!”
The Meligun blinked its eyes. “There are Anarchate tours that one can take for such an experience,” it said in what may have been the Meligun version of boredom. “But thank you. Anything is better than staring at juvenile vidcasts of lower caste entertainers. And this Playslate barely begins to challenge my mind.”
Suzanne wondered if the two human Owners of Omega had been as full of themselves as this Meligun. She’d never met them, though her friend Sarah had. As the representative of the human managers working for the casino, Sarah had attended annual meetings with the fifteen Owners. An event she was sure this Meligun would have enjoyed.
“Well, after we emerge you can watch our automated Remotes use their electromagnetic scoops to ingather hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium,
along with some ionized oxygen,” she said brightly. “Course these gases are very rare in the stream, but watching the Remotes might entertain your mind. You could guess which portion of the stream holds the densest concentration of isotopes and thereby—”
“Please! I suffer neuron starvation at the very concept!”
She grinned, then brushed down the wrinkles in her embroidered summer dress. It was a waste of life energy to hope the Meligun would ever look beyond its personal view of reality. But surely greed would wake it up? “Uh, then what about computing the probabilities of the platinum Standards to be made from automated mining of the nearby part of the Magellanic Stream?” she said. “While the desired fuel isotopes are very rare, still, automated Remote barges cost little beyond their construction cost, they have no organics on board to feed, and the quality of the onboard AI is low, far believe the sentience level. What do you think?”
The Meligun bear sat forward, its posture shifting from superior dominance to one of greedy interest. “Now
that
is a worthwhile idea, bondServant Suzanne. Are there any negatives to mining the stream that you know of?”
She stepped back toward the slidedoor that let onto the Spine hallway, happy to have diverted the bear’s usual complaint mode. “Well, I am told by the Mata Hari the AI that where we will emerge is very close to, or overlaps with, a Do Not Enter zone of the Anarchate. But I’m sure a little danger would not discourage someone of Clan Klickjo!”
The Meligun grimaced, showing sharp incisors. “A Do Not Enter zone? Now that could be a problem. However, I happen to be friends with a regional Combat Command general who might patrol the mining area, in return for a share of the profits. Ummm. A useful idea, bondServant Suzanne. Thank you,” it said as it turned to its datapad and set about entering financial inputs.
She stepped out into the Spine hallway, feeling half amused. At least the alien had said
‘Thank You’ to her, a pleasantry very rare among the super-rich. She would have to let Matthew know about this interest of the Meligun. Maybe they could gain some intelligence on this unknown zone by way of Meligun greed.
Matt
noticed Suzanne’s return from taking care of the Meligun bear. She joined the rest of them on the Bridge as they neared the time of emergence from Translation. Sitting in the Interlock Pit, with all his senses linked into the inner and outer elements of starship
Mata Hari
, and with the AI minds of Mata Hari, Gatekeeper and eventually BattleMind, he gave thanks for the three weeks of escape from
ocean-time
, and from the mind-flow of BattleMind. While the T’Chak AI had never apologized for its overwhelming outburst in the Megadeen system, it had tolerated their possession of the Meligun, and even said a few positive words about the lifeweb assemblage of greenery and lake that Gatekeeper had created. It had commented that a ‘natural’ environment for organics like themselves seemed to be a desirable addition to the starship’s ecohabitats. For the T’Chak, that was a remarkably friendly statement.
“Matthew,” called Eliana from her accel-couch. “Will there be much to see of this
Magellanic Stream?”
He looked left to his lifepartner, to the white skin, long black tresses, high cheeks and green eyes of the woman who had made love to him last night, after he’d finished several runs on his loom. She’d tackled him when he got up to feed the aquarium’s
puffer-fish, and the rest of the night had been filled with intimate pleasures, memories shared, dreams hoped for, and the apple smell of her hair as he spoon slept against her back. He’d felt more peace last night than he’d felt since the loss of Helen. Between the two of them he’d learned how to move beyond his fear of caring, of linking with someone who might be taken away from him, as his parents and sisters had been taken. Now, after seven years of partnership with Mata Hari, he was relearning how to be a lifepartner with a wonderful woman who sported a prehensile tail and a taste for ribald drinking songs, as he’d discovered during the Morrigan park party too many weeks ago. He smiled at her.
“Eliana, my love, you are beautiful looking today,”
he said, then looked past George to nod at blond-haired Suzanne. “As do you, mistress Suzanne. Your embroidery gifts have given my dear Eliana an enjoyment of style and dresses that her laboratory work never seemed to awaken.”
“Matthew!” said Eliana in a pleased tone.
“So true,” rumbled George’s baritone voice as a wide grin filled his bearded face. The Irishman’s grey eyes were filled with amusement. After the alien shapes of Omega and Galifray, it was pleasant to see his combat mate. “My Suzanne has a mind for intricate flower patterns that delight me, Eliana and, she has told me, your partner Mata Hari.”
Matt smiled at the sudden holo appearance of Mata Hari and Gatekeeper, whose side-by-side holos now stood in the open space between Eliana and the Pit. “Welcome, friends. Is the park’s inertial field activated in case of sudden movements after emergence?”
Mata Hari’s glowing smile seemed to light up that part of the Bridge. “Yes, Matthew! And the yellow rose bush that Eliana planted earlier is growing very nicely. Perhaps it will flower soon!”
Gatekeeper, dressed in his country gardener outfit with stains on the knees of his
brown jumpsuit, nodded his bullet head. “Yes,” the Omega AI said in a warm bass voice. “She and Eliana have added much liveliness to my park habitat.”
The Omega AI reached over to hold hands with Mata Hari
Something the two had been doing since before Galifray. Could her control of mini-tractors to give her holo form a degree of substance be something Gatekeeper had copied so they could ‘feel’ the solidity of holding hands? Whatever the answer, they were a fully emotional couple able to relate to him and Eliana, George and Suzanne, in the normal manner. It was a delight Matt gave thanks for, amidst the death and destruction of fighting a war.
“Friends, we will emerge in three minutes,” he said. “And while things will look very black and empty, the gas stream is just adjacent to where we will emerge.
But if you look north galactic, you will see the golden-yellow glow of home galaxy’s Core region. The side wallscreen will show that view.”
Matt turned back to face the front holosphere, filled now with the
greyness of Alcubierre space-time. Shortly it would show the deep blackness of space, a space sprinkled with the colorful jewels of distant stars and even more distant galaxies, since they would not be facing the disk of home galaxy. Instead, they would be facing the stream, which was visible only to his infrared vision, and the nearby star cluster that the Anarchate had marked as a Do Not Enter zone. While they were not inside the zone, they would appear immediately next to it. Hopefully their few days of scooping in hydrogen isotopes would pass without notice from whomever lived in the cluster. Feeling a twinge at the back of his neck, Matt reached back and attached the fiber optic cable. His mind became flooded by an ocean of inputs from the starship and its devices, supplemented by the low power laser beams that criss-crossed his naked body as he sat like an olive in a martini glass. It was an drink image he’d discovered years ago, while visiting a human ‘bar’ that served expensive drinks modeled on antique patterns. He’d tossed the ‘olive’ to the floor for the cleanbot to ingest, then tried to enjoy the liquor in the glass. He’d swallowed it but had chosen beers afterward.
“We emerge now,” Mata Hari said aloud to her audience.
Matt entered
ocean-time
as a precaution. And his body became one with the starship and local space.
His eyes “saw” infrared, ultraviolet, gamma ray and radioactives, painting for him a non-human picture of Riemannian space.
Feeling the pull of grav plates throughout the two kilometer length of the ship, and the light puffs of air circulation through the habitable areas, Matt ignored the particle glows of the Restricted Rooms and focused solely on the degree to which starship
Mata Hari
worked and lived in all its components. But in the back of his mind hovered the red cloud of Mata Hari, the brown cloud of Gatekeeper, and the roiling, tempestuous purple cloud of BattleMind. The T’Chak held back from full mind-link, as if concerned for him. He appreciated that.
The purple of gamma rays sleeted through the holosphere and the nearby Magellanic Stream
, much like a rain squall might hit an open meadow. Yellow neutrino particles flickered here and there, appearing sparse since they were not near any star. Only his ship’s fusion reactors and the stars of the nearby cluster pulsed neutrinos their way. Infrared was nearly dead, except for the stream, whose hot ionized gases rushed toward home galaxy, pulled that way by gravity tidal forces. He’d learned that they would be traveling the short end of the stream, a stretch called the Leading Arm. Further down the stream they would encounter the Large Magellanic Cloud and cross a gaseous bridge to the Small Magellanic Cloud. They would then pass by the Population II red giant stars on the cloud’s outer edge and head inward to the Population I stars where life existed, as it did around most Population I stars of the galaxy, stars like Sol.
“No sign of artificial constructs,” said Mata Hari in his mind.
Matt agreed with her assessment. So far all he saw was the red infrared of the stream, the purple of gamma rays, some weak ultraviolet emissions, distant x-ray star emissions, and the mixed grouping of Population I and II stars in the cluster ahead of them. Like most developed star clusters it lacked the dust and dark gas clouds common to younger stellar regions. Sighing, he left
ocean-time
so he could relate to his human companions.