“My fellow humans, I am Matthew Raven’s-Wing Dragoneaux, late of the human colony Thuringia at Pl-3 Orion.” The approaching people slowed, becoming a wide arc focused on him and Eliana. “Eliana has told you of my reason for destroying the casino, of the death of my love as we sought escape from this place’s Owners, and how I came to become a part human, part cyborg Vigilante in my effort to bring justice to a few peoples in our part of the galaxy.” He paused, noting that most faces showed worry mixed with impatience. “Enough of history. This casino will be destroy
ed in thirty minutes time as part of the lesson I am teaching to Anarchate conglomerates and to its Combat Command about the wrongness of owning people. You will be shuttled to my starship, there to remain in personal roomsuites until we exit this system. After consulting with Sarah and other leaders, I will seek a colony world to which I can take you. Take care of your children, leave any weapons behind and be prepared for handling by my personal AI, Mata Hari. She appears now,” he said, gesturing to his left.
Mata Hari, using the entertainment emitters of the Arrival Hall, took form in a large holosphere. Dressed in her white lace Victorian dress, with a neck choker of pearls, her black hair piled atop her
amber face, she nodded at the crowd, then smiled. “Welcome to starship
Mata Hari
and to my company. We will work to accommodate you. My sensors are everywhere, so if there is a need, just call my name and a part of me will respond,” she said. Then she looked to Matt.
With a nod to the refugee humans he told Suit to bring his combat helmet down, though with a clear faceplate. “While we are in-system and under threat, this is how you will see me. Once departed in Alcubierre Translation, I will be dressed in more normal fashion. Now, we depart! Follow!”
Matt turned with a helmeted Eliana and headed for the slidedoor and the three shuttles that stood ready to transport this crowd. A voice called from behind him. “What about the two human Owners? Where are they? Will they also be rescued?”
A male in his sixties, his hair just showing grey, had spoken. With a minor thought he had Suit tag the human as someone to watch. Activating Suit’s external speakers, he answered.
“The human Owners are slave owners through contract bondage. They will leave with the other thirteen Owners, after every other lifeform is safe in orbit or headed out for the heliopause. Follow.”
Everyone followed him and
Eliana. The holo of Mata Hari, Sarah Vasiliades and 151 other humans of all sizes, shapes and ages followed behind, most carrying a briefcase or large suitcase, as instructed by Eliana during his absence. Matt led the way to the three shuttle boarding tubes, then took himself and Eliana into and through a service airlock. Looking up at the purple-black of the starry sky, he called for a lift.
“Mata Hari, please bring us up via tractor beam. I wish to be on the Bridge before boarding.
“Complying, Matthew,” she said.
Within Suit Matt felt the gentle pull upward of one of starship
Mata Hari’s
tractor beams, a beam strong enough to rip apart the casino dome. They were on their way to escape, and likely to a new Anarchate confrontation. Sighing, Matt hoped his decision to bring refugees aboard the starship would, in truth, give BattleMind some degree of understanding of organic lifeforms. He had some exotic plans for his future war campaign that needed more than rote responses from a very smart, very dangerous, very alien AI.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Sitting naked in the Interlock Pit of the Bridge, with Eliana safely sheltered in a cocooning accel-couch to his left, Matt pulled his attention away from the 22 starships that were leaving orbit with the blessing of Mata Hari as she removed her limpet complink controls over their onboard Navigation computers. He took a moment to adjust to his clear plastic seat.
He rested hands on transparent input pads, snugged feet against similar pads, and felt his body restrained by the inertial motion fields. The fields kept him safe during vector changes. Wouldn’t do to have him bouncing off expensive alien hardware.
While inertial motion fields were normal in all starships, what was not normal were the low power yellow laser beams that touched him from head to toe.
Optical neurolinking it was. It meant that Matt felt the ship as if it were a suit of clothes. And the ship felt him as if he were . . . what?
As a human-cyborg hybrid, he was used to vid-images displayed against his contact lenses. Used to his body’s autonomic linkage with onboard nanoware CPUs. He’d even gotten used to the knowledge-augmentation databyte nanocubes that rested in his brain’s visual cortex—they gave him See-Identify education in strange phenomena. But this optical neurolinking was different. Even after seven years, he was still adjusting to it. As was Eliana, who had boarded his ship with a rampant hatred of artificial intelligences. Due to a medical tragedy her aunt had suffered. Now, Eliana was . . . female-friendly to Mata Hari whenever his AI materialized in holo form. It was a change he welcomed.
The back of his neck twinged.
Mata Hari was reminding him it was time to get under way and leave Omega. With a sigh, Matt reached back, grabbed the multi-pin optical fiber cable, and plugged it into the receptor implanted in the back of his neck. At cervical vertebrae one level.
Matt focused, accepting electronic and lightspeed photonic input.
The dam burst as once more he took in ship systems. He stayed out of
ocean-time
since no threat had yet appeared. Still, oceans filled him, oceans of sensor-fed data filled his mind’s eye.
“Matthew,” said Mata Hari in his mind and aloud for Eliana’s benefit, “the twenty-third staryacht with the fifteen Owners on board is
now departing, but our friend the AI Gatekeeper has left it and is heading our way. He wishes to board us and travel as part of the human grouping. What do I tell him?”
Matt appreciated the fact that Mata Hari was talking to him at
slow human normal speed, rather than forcing him into
ocean-
time and direct tachlink with Gatekeeper. “Tell him he is welcome, but must remain in the commissary section and not seek to interfere with any ship systems whatsoever, unless you, I or BattleMind ask for his assistance. Does he agree?”
“He agrees,” Mata Hari said in a tone that felt to Matt like excitement.
Hmmm
. A female AI and a male AI. Could there be more to the two of them being together than simple algorithm sharing? “Matthew! Stop thinking
that
way!”
Matt grinned to himself, did
not look at Eliana and thought/spoke agreement. “Yes, that was impolite of me. Have the ship’s flexhull pouch out, englobe him and deliver him to the commissary now that he understands our conditions of acceptance.”
“Complying,” Mata Hari said with a stiffness to her tone that made Matt bite his lip. He focused instead on the forward holosphere which depicted Omega and the Casino dome and Guardian box. He
tensed both biceps. “Mata Hari, feed full power to the antimatter pontoons, please.”
Eliana inhaled sharply but said nothing. Matt went to gestalt mode and became one with the outer and inner ship, albeit at slow organic speed. Squinting his eyes at the telescopic image of the casino that lay two thousand kilometers below their orbit, he visualized a targeting bull’s
eye and thought the command.
Two coherent antimatter beams shot downward, one from each pontoon. Their blackness was a match for the black
rock surface of Omega’s airless surface. Brilliant white light filled the holosphere until dampened automatically. Though there was no air to carry the sound of a miniature sun suddenly creating a hundred meter deep, six kilometer wide crater where once the casino and outbuildings had stood, he imagined it. From his memory of Suit combat on planets and in Despot Ioannis’ space station recently, he added sound to the light picture of his vengeance.
“
Helen, I remember you,” he whispered softly. Then, looking briefly at Eliana and ordering Suit to magnetic lock with the Bridge hull plates, he turned back to the front holosphere, which his thoughts had changed to image the outer third and fourth planets as the vector line of their departure. He ignored the other escaping starships, all of which were heading for the heliopause of Zeta Serpentis in a direction the opposite of his. Seems like the liberated aliens wished to be far away from Matt and his starship. So be it. “Mata Hari, take us out on deut-li fusion impulse drive, working up to one-half lightspeed.”
“Complying Matthew,” said his partner in a tone that sounded normal, not miffed, and focused on doing her job as perfectly as a smart AI can do a job.
His cyborg senses were the first to detect the gravity waves that arriving starships emit when materializing in normal space-time from Alcubierre Drive Translation.
Ahead of
them the gas giant fifth planet shuddered in its orbit as two Anarchate battleglobes appeared deep within the gravity field of Zeta Serpentis. He saw their physical form because of the tachlink sensor Remotes that
Mata Hari
had spat out like beads during their slow entry into the system from the heliopause. It seemed as if the Anarchate did not care if their arrival caused planet five to change orbit. Or that both ships had taken a gamble that no asteroid occupied the same space-time locality as their arrival spots. He sighed as half the holosphere glared red Combat Alarm with the battleglobe images.
“The Anarchate arrives,” he said, mostly for Eliana’s benefit. “They are decelerating. I estimate we will meet them just beyond the orbit of the fourth planet. Mata Hari, please
increase our deut-li drive power but keep us below our three-quarters lightspeed maximum. I do not wish any survivors to know our full capabilities.”
“Survivors?” Eliana whispered, her voice fearful. “Matt, there are
two
of them. Shouldn’t we head away from them, escape at an angle they cannot match? Or just Translate out of the system right now? We’ve done it before.”
Matt shook his head.
“Stage Two of my plan—”
“Anticipated,” interrupted a harsh growl from a holosphere to his right as the dragon shape of
BattleMind suddenly appeared, “the opportunity for further Anarchate defeats. Two ships together is a new, welcome challenge to my weapon senses. Matthew Dragoneaux, we now partner in fighting these stupid lifeforms. And I choose . . . a different Battle Configuration for this starship. Observe but do not interfere. Though I do accept any ‘sneaky’ tactical concepts you wish to offer.”
“Understood,” Matt said.
He and Eliana went silent. She watched the forward holosphere, while Matt’s gestalt sense saw and felt the changes ordered by BattleMind.
In
the deep dark coldness of space, starship
Mata Hari
changed its inner and outward appearance.
Inside him, in
Matt’s gestalt perception, there flowed over the PET relays something he had experienced only once before.
Those parts of his cyborg self that matched to various ship systems, hallways, storerooms, fusion plants, armories and scores of other facilities he was used to sensing, those parts changed. They changed as, slowly, the Restricted Rooms of the ship came on-line. They opened up, for the second time in seven years. And all the while, the dragon persona of BattleMind kept him from affecting anything that now happened.
Fortunately, the T’Chak AI was buffering its datafeed to his mind. But once he went to
ocean-time
Matt would be flooded by a computer dataflow that felt like a tsunami of images.
In the neurolinked senses of his m
ind, Matt felt deeply this new change as BattleMind unfolded all of the ship’s weaponry capabilities. Things of unimaginable power and ferocity were coming online. Compared to these things, appearing by the will of BattleMind, Matt felt the weapons he’d used at SAO 47250 were puny. These . . . these things were at least ten orders of magnitude more powerful than anything he had ever used in his seven years as a Vigilante for hire. Once more, the Restricted Rooms lay open to his gaze.
Matt entered,
recognizing each wonder from their prior appearance at Sigma Puppis.
To
supersede his old Bethe Inducer that could make a sun go nova, online came a quark-based graviton beamer that would emit a brilliant yellow beam of coherent gravitons. This beam would literally compress any object into a miniature black hole, as had happened at SAO 47250. It was the final weapon that no one but the T’Chak possessed.
Next to the
graviton beamer loomed something else. Something that did not exist fully in this space-time. Something that only glowed. It glowed with escaping neutrinos. BattleMind had told him this neutrino-emitting room could turn any planet into a miniature star of pure plasma. Matt called the device the Sun Glow. It too was unique to the T’Chak aliens.
In a different Room lay something Matt
understood. Supplementing his two neutron antimatter pontoons, four more pontoons appeared, for a total of six AM cannons that could spit antimatter annihilation at any opponent. And because the antimatter was coherent neutrons, which had no particle charge, the AM beam could not be deflected by any electromagnetic deflection field.
On the outer hull, the bristling HF and CO2 laser projectors were crowded aside by five new bulging pods that connected directly to the Alcubierre Drive fusion bottle, and to subsidiary fusion backups. Flickering about the five pods hung a sense of unreality, of time disjointed.
He recognized the sense from every Translation he had experienced. These five pods could project Alcubierre pocket universes—just like the main drive. But they appeared as flat sheets, rather than an encompassing Translation globe. The sheets had protected the starship from the Anarchate’s own antimatter beams during the Sigma Puppis battle, and during the Intelligence dome battle.
Then, like a giant clearing its throat, a two kilometer-long accelerator funnel took form in the central axis guts of
Mata Hari
. At its base flared the largest plasma generator he’d ever seen. Along its length and at its front end spiraled superconducting magnetic field coils. The magcoils would direct the resulting plasma globe outward, then up, down, sideways—in any direction. But unerringly at any foe. His mind churning with log scale math figures, Matt realized that this axial plasma gun alone contained enough energy to shatter the crust of a planet. With one shot. This weapon was a world-wrecker.
The Restricted Rooms he had met before. But the new, outer shape of
starship
Mata Hari
was something new. Something reflective of BattleMind’s front row seat in this combat.
In space, a
dragon spread its wings.
While keeping the
standard central tube and side AM pontoons, his starship now sported a flexmetal shape that closely imitated the T’Chak dragon shape. A long tail and long neck with nodules that housed energy projectors for point defense action covered all portions of the central body. But now, two giant wings carried the original antimatter pontoons at their tips. Joining them were four more AM projectors between the central hull and the outer wingtips. Now, six AM projectors could fire ahead, rotate rearward, or fire in any axis chosen by BattleMind. And at its front, just below and ahead of the Bridge, there appeared the shape of a crocodile’s head, red laser eye mounts gleaming in the night, with its interlocking teeth ready to open and spit forth world-wrecking fire from the axial plasma gun.
In truth, a dragon flew through space, its tail streaming golden fire as its
purple scales gleamed with energy and threat.
He wondered what the Anarchate commanders
in each of the twelve kilometer-wide Nova battleglobes thought of this alien ship that rushed
toward
them, rather than away.
“Mata Hari, what is the approach speed of the
se battleglobes?”
“One quarter lightspeed and slowing, Matthew,” she told him.
“It appears they wish to encounter us near to the fourth planet, which is twenty light minutes to our left side.”
While Eliana watched the oncoming Anarchate ships
on the forward holosphere, Matt kept one mind-eye on the holo shape of BattleMind while thinking of options that would allow them to survive. The steady approach and in-system materialization told him these Anarchate ship commanders had a plan for fighting
Mata Hari
. And confident ship commanders made Matt feel . . . uneasy.
“Mata Hari, your sensor Remotes that you seeded on the way into this system. How many of them lie along the path the Anarchate ships are taking to meet up with us?”