Matt smiled behind his opaque faceplate. There was no way he was going to breath air that might contain airborne deathspores newly released by the AI while he was cutting access. Nor would he assume all offensive weapons were dead. The AI was talking with him for the same reason he was—to gain intelligence before acting. So be it.
“I doubt that, AI. My ship was made by the ancient T’Chak aliens. The ship’s name is one I like.” Matt turned around on his Nullgrav boots, never having placed his weight on the steel plated floor. “Now where is your backup molecular memory crystal stored?”
“There is no such object,” the AI said quickly. “All comp panels and storage devices were either wiped clean by your EMP pulse or as part of the intentional Alert shutdown that is uniform at all installations threatened with unauthorized access.”
“So say you,” Matt murmured. “But my Spelidon master sometimes talked in its sleep. And I learned its vernacular language shortly after joining its household. A neurowhip motivates one to quick learning,” he said sourly, recalling the severe taskmaster who had hired him to be little more than a two-legged watch animal over its belongings. “As a result I learned of this desert planet circling an F5 yellow-white star that is north of the galactic equator and about 329 light years from my small home world. And learned that while the star was a main sequence star with multiple planets in its lifezone, no settlements existed here, only this Intelligence dome and some outposts. A good reason for visiting, I think.” Matt scanned the room’s ceiling, noting a few grills for air circulation whenever an organic was allowed access, the yellow-glowing light tubes that radiated out from a central power block, and nothing else. He increased power to his Nullgrav boots.
“What are you doing?” the AI asked, its pink glow darkening.
Matt smiled. That was the problem with self-aware artificial intelligences. They had as much curiosity as organics. Even asking a question gave him intelligence data. And told him his guess was correct.
“Accessing the backup molecular memory crystal,” he said, reaching up with his gauntleted right hand to pop open the power block cover, while keeping his Magnum laser rifle still pointed at the AI pedestal. The green cube of the crystal, the size of an ancient golf ball, dropped into his palm. “See? We organics taught you AIs how to lie. Trying to lie to an organic is like . . . teaching your grandmother to suck eggs,” Matt said as he recalled a lesson from his mother
Kristin when he worked their soybean farm. Before the genome harvesters raided his colony world and took his entire family captive to be used for making cloneslaves. “Except you AIs do not possess organic grandparents.”
The AI’s pink glow darkened to nearly red. “You will not escape the
battleglobe that is even now Translating into this star system,” it said triumphantly.
“
Mata Hari,” he PET thought-imaged to his partner. “Has the Anarchate battleglobe arrived?”
“Yes, Matthew. But it arrived just beyond the outermost planet, per the Standard Rule for approaching planet-bound star systems. The gravity wave from its arrival was detected a moment ago. One of our decoy Remotes should be able to image it shortly and downlink that data via
tachlink. We are now above the dome. Will you join us?”
“Yes,” he replied, then focused on the AI. “M
y friend, after we defeat this battleglobe, tell Combat Command that Matthew Dragoneaux and his friends have declared war on the Anarchate. This is only the first of our attacks. More will come. Of course, you have a whole galaxy to defend while we can pick and choose a location that does not have a naval armada nearby, thanks to your memory crystal.
Aloha
, little thinker.”
A wall laser mount brightened to life and spat an orange beam at him. Matt’s adaptive optics sapphire crystals broke the beam into hundreds of low power streams.
“Naughty naughty, little AI,” Matt vocalized over Suit’s external speakers. “Be thankful I am letting you continue to exist. The Anarchate must receive the full text of our war declaration, including your record of my defeat of your Guardian. And the incoming Nova. To avoid defeat, they have only to outlaw cloneslavery and bondservitude. And give up the bribes from the commercial conglomerates. Have a good day, little one.”
“You disorganized cluster of DNA strands! You organic assemblage of self-deluding neurons that forget most of what you learn! You
, you—”
Matt flew out of the Intelligence dome and upward to the hovering two kilometer length of
Dreadnought
Mata Hari
, Eliana and BattleMind, already thinking about Phase Three of his Plan. And his effort to delay BattleMind’s departure for the Small Magellanic Cloud.
While he was curious about the T’Chak aliens, Matt had learned from his long ago study of asymmetric warfare that underestimating your enemy was a guarantee of eventual defeat. Now all he had to do was work at convincing the T’Chak BattleMind that a few one-on-one starship victories did not a war campaign make.
CHAPTER
TWO
On the Bridge of Dreadnought
Mata Hari
, Matt the Pure Breed human sat in the Interlock Pit of an alien starship like an olive in a martini glass, naked as the day he’d been born. He was naked because that was how Mata Hari the AI talked to him. And how he talked back. Matt’s bare skin soaked in thousands of lightbeam inputs that talked to his skin, from inputs emitted by the control devices that lined the cone-shaped Interlock Pit. Light moved so much faster than electrons-down-a-wire cable, and the beams caressed every inch of his body. Touching here. Touching there. Whispering. Cajoling. Making direct contact with electrochemical receptors, firing down nerve fiber pathways, filling him with, with . . .
Ecstasy could not begin to match it.
He’d called it
ocean-time
the first time he’d gone on-line with the feminine Mata Hari mind persona. And the AI had no special phrase for what she and Matt did—lightspeed linking was simply how she thought, lived, felt and ran the mech-tech construct called a starship. But a little time in that mode physically exhausted him.
He’d tried explaining it to Eliana, when first she’d seen him enter the Bridge,
back out of Suit, and step down naked into the Pit, where he sat in a form-molded glass chair that allowed lightbeams easy access to his skin. Matt rested at the bottom of a metal-lined cone, a cone filled with flashing lightbeams that did not hurt . . . usually. The cone breathed with him, hurt with him, talked to him, and listened as he talked back—with a shrug, with a blink, with a change in PET-sensed alpha brain rhythms. He controlled his levels of adrenaline, signaling with his body, a puppet on lightbeam strings who talked back to the puppetmaster.
Matt shivered as the fever of a severe cold hit him courtesy of the slow virus that his Halicene opponent Legion had infected hi
m with . . . just after he had rescued Eliana’s grandfather Petros. He’d crushed the Halicene under an engine block then. But both Eliana and Mata Hari had agreed the designer virus was able to “jump” into different chromosome genes, varying the illnesses that it could visit on Matt. The starship’s Biolab had blocked most ill effects thanks to tailored retroviruses and monoclonal antibodies. But finding the primary slow virus was something not yet achieved by either of his friends. So he coped.
“
Mata Hari, where is the Anarchate battleglobe at this moment?”
His AI partner appeared in the forward holo globe, still dressed in a white Victorian dress with a
pearl bead clasp at her neck. “The Anarchate warship is now passing the sixth of this system’s eight planets, according to the pebble sensors of our decoy Remote,” she said. “Its speed is one-half lightspeed and slowing. Its approach vector is the Intelligence dome.”
Eliana sat nearby in an accel-
couch, sharing the Bridge with him and Mata Hari’s Memory Pillars home. She had hugged him as soon as he had backed out of Suit through its clamshell opening, but then understood he had combat work to do first. Later could come a visit to his private suite, the one place where he kept personal mementoes and memories. And which she shared with him as their home. She focused jade green eyes on him, her expression encouraging.
“We beat them once,” Eliana said. “We can do it a second time.”
Matt agreed a second victory was likely. And BattleMind surely hungered to unleash the super weapons in the Restricted Rooms. But risking the only starship capable of defeating an Anarchate warship was not done lightly.
“You are probably right, my dearest love.” Matt turned from Eliana’s
albino white face to the holo image of Mata Hari. “Partner, can you compute an in-system Translation such that we end up just behind the battleglobe?”
His AI partner tilted her head, in a perfect human analogue of thoughtful consideration. “I can. Though the exact parameters mean we could end up very close to the Nova
battleglobe, or too distant for us to fire first. Your wishes?”
“Please compute the Translation matrix,” he said. Matt gestured to his right, causing
a second holo globe to appear. Eliana sucked in her breath as she recognized his intention.
“BattleMind, you have been monitoring our discussion and the results of my
combat foray to the Intelligence dome. You have had time to review the molecular memory crystal with its data on Anarchate installations. Do you support my plan for battling the Nova battleglobe?”
The hologlobe darkened, filled with swirling pink and yellow streamers, then cleared to present the image of a T’Chak alien. Matt gulped as
he confronted a twelve foot tall, two winged, two armed, two legged and long tailed alien that resembled an Earthly dragon to a remarkable degree. The body armor plates on its spine and sides were purple-colored, while its chest and abdomen were yellow-scaled. It was the image of a real T’Chak alien. BattleMind was clearly reminding him of its duty to return home with the combat intelligence.
“I support it,” the dragon said with a yawn of a tooth-filled, pink-tongued mouth. Two
ruby-red eyes fixed on him. “Your justification for release of my Mata Hari modulus, the support of your Eliana partner, and your combat entry to the Anarchate facility have convinced me of your usefulness.” Eliana sighed, but still bit her lip. “This technique of . . . sneakiness is novel to my experience, but clearly useful in the gaining of data that would have been lost in the antimatter destruction of the facility. I agree with your plan to engage in further combat with Anarchate entities, though each segment must be discussed with me. Final control of this warship rests with me, of course.”
“Of course,” Matt said, turning away from the T’Chak dragon and focusing on
Mata Hari’s calm persona. “Partner, have your decoy Remote leave stealth and begin broadcasting as if it were us. Then, initiate the Translation to put us just behind the Nova battleglobe.”
“Yes, Matthew,” Mata Hari said with a smile, as if she were the real human and he just a vidgame holo.
Matt entered
ocean-time
, knowing he had to be in full sensory-link with the starship’s offensive weaponry the moment they reappeared behind the Anarchate battleglobe.
The dam burst. Oceans filled him, oceans of machine-fed data filled his
mind’s eye.
The silvery tube of the ship’s flexhull shivered in space, its shapechanging ability a thing unknown to human or Anarchate shipbuilders. His back itched as directed energy weapon domes popped out onto the hull. His biceps fed power to the ship’s two antimatter cannons, which lay alongside the main hull like pontoons on an outrigger sailboat. He clenched tight his jaw muscles, bringing on-line the deuterium-lithium six fusion drive for
chasing after the battleglobe. Ears listened to tachyonic comlinks, synthetic aperture and phased array radars. His eyes ‘saw’ infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays and radioactives, painting for him a non-human picture of Riemannian space. Matt sniffed. Nose smelled through subtle sensors, devices that could detect biological spores drifting through space upon ancient stellar winds. Inside his chest, his heart beat. Oh, how it beat! It beat in sync with the Alcubierre Drive that could move him and
Mata Hari
from one star to another in days.
Instinct allied to emotion allied to analytical thought. Matt was a true cyborg . . . and it was time to go to work.
Femtoseconds sped along and picoseconds felt like the ticks of an ancient mechanical clock. A nanosecond would feel like an hour, while a millisecond would feel . . . longer. He sighed, knowing there would be reentry shock when they materialized behind the battleglobe. He hoped he would not faint, as had occurred during the battle with the Nova battleglobe of Commander Chai, in Sigma Puppis B system.
This was a gamble. But this time he knew about the super-weapons in the Restricted Rooms. And he knew how long it would take the Nova
battleglobe to start up its own Bethe Inducer field in an effort to turn starship
Mata Hari
into a few neutron star particles. He would act decisively before that occurred. Eliana was his new love, a unique person he would never sacrifice for any reason. Nor would he betray his AI partner Mata Hari, who had rescued him from a lifepod and had remade him into a cyborg-human melding of unique abilities.
In the Pit, Matt felt the inertial fields come on, pressing him into his chair. He relaxed, but did not shut off external ship sensors. His bare skin flew through the coldness of space. Like a double-image, he was both inside the ship, and outside. It would be rough experiencing the timelessness of Alcubierre
Drive Translation while still in cyborg-link with his ship. Matt had no choice. He must be completely alert and aware when they materialized behind the Anarchate Nova-class battleglobe. He had a surprise he wanted to try out.
Fifteen milliseconds
, pulsed his internal timelog.
“Translating!”
called Mata Hari.
All about him, reality went
grey, amorphous, indistinct—and shocking. Space-time changed.
All his senses suddenly cut off. Nothing communicated to him. Sensory deprivation screamed across his extended, raw nerve endings.
And pure blackness greeted the flexmetal hull’s vid sensors. His lungs wanted to gasp. His mind wanted to blank out. But anger at the uncaring nature of the Anarchate, of a galactic system that enforced anarchy among the stars because it was profitable, gave him the strength to remain aware. To be ready. To be—
Translation ended.
Three hundred milliseconds,
said his onboard nanoBit computer.
Matt blinked, slowly, still in
ocean-time
, still feeling his Dreadnought starship like a suit of clothes one wears to the first day of school. Well-fitting, but a bit . . . tight-feeling. He PET-imaged his “surprise” and hoped the battleglobe commander had not set his StratTac CPU on automatic Combat Mode. Mentally inhaling, Matt saw his new location in all its glory. And danger.
Black space surrounded them, speckled by a few bright stars and a nebula or two. Ahead of them, just three hundred kilometers away, loomed the
twelve kilometer wide hull of the Anarchate battleglobe. In less than fifty milliseconds it would detect the gravity wave pulse of starship
Mata Hari
behind it. Its organic commander would take a few seconds to order the Defense modalities to fire in their direction—unless the StratTac CPU was on automode.
Three hundred twenty millise
conds.
“Matthew,” whispered Mata Hari in his mind. “Our surprise is
initiating.”
“Thank you, partner
, for a perfect Translation placement,” he PET replied.
Matt watched as, per his PET thought-image, both the right and left antimatter pontoons fired coherent beams of
black neutron antimatter at the battleglobe. Other lightspeed beams followed as the proton beamers, plasma cannons, hydrogen-fluorine metal punch lasers, excimer lasers, free electron lasers, and neutral particle beam lasers fired from dozens of hull mounts that left his starship feeling like a prickly cactus. The lightspeed weapons were followed by four 20 megaton thermonuclear torps that angled off to the four corners of their course inward, past the star’s fifth planet, a Jupiter-like analogue of green and pink cyclonic clouds. The Defense torps followed, putting out massive amounts of electronic white noise, three decoy images of Dreadnought
Mata Hari
similar to the decoy Remote that lay a thousand kilometers ahead of them and toward which the battleglobe had been headed, and finally a cloud of gaseous mercury to absorb any return laser fire. The cloud was embedded with nanoBit computers that would magnetically open holes for his return fire on a pattern known only to him and Mata Hari. He did not think it necessary to activate the flat Alcubierre space-time shields that would absorb any incoming weapon.
Nine hundred milliseconds.
Acting on impulse, Matt swiveled the fusion pulse system drive sideways to push
Mata Hari
off the line of its initial Translation appearance.
A blac
k beam of antimatter counterfire came at them two seconds after his “surprise” attack had begun, running directly along their Translation arrival point. While the mercury cloud soaked up some of the beam, its three centimeter width was far too much to be absorbed by Matt’s decoys and the mercury cloud. And now he had his answer.
The Anarchate commander had indeed set his StratTac CPU on automatic Defense mode, with the ability to fire any weapon upon detection of what the CPU considered a threat. Matt smiled. Perhaps he would have a chance to see this commander. Before he annihilated the
battleglobe.
Two seconds, five hundred and thirty-two milliseconds
, murmured his nanoBit time tracker.
The forward holo stars were replaced by a tachyon vidimage from the original decoy Remote and from passive nanoSensors that had been seeded in the pathway of the
Nova.
“Matt!” called Eliana. “
It’s wounded badly!”
Her voice sounded slow and disjointed to his
ocean-time
filled mind. Mentally he smiled. For he had already perceived via PET imagery from Mata Hari what was now appearing in the front holo.