Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (34 page)

Matt dove into timelessness.

One hundred twenty milliseconds
.

The ship vibrated like a tuning fork to a nearby torp explosion. His left arm burned intensely as two HF beams got through, burning away two square meters of hullplate. Then the ship’s rotation disrupted the laser beam focus. The holo decoys were not working very well.

He flinched.

Flipping nose to tail,
::
fled backwards at one-half lightspeed, just light-seconds ahead of the energy wavefront from
Obliteration’s
beam weaponry. Which was trailed by the Mican’s hypervelocity Fire-and-Forget Nanoshells. A deadly double-punch. Matt fired his own long-range beam weapons.

Two seconds
.

He shrugged.

The ship turned end-for-end once more.

Five seconds
.

He tensed.

Extra armor plating covered their engine nacelles.

Nine seconds
.

Blinking, he caused the antimatter pontoons to rotate 180 degrees so they could fire rearwards.

Fifteen seconds
.

He shivered, causing the many small plasma cannons to fire, vaporizing those few solid projectiles that got close. But Legion’s energy wavefront moved at lightspeed while they ran at half that. Soon, all too soon, the front would sweep through their gas shield.

Twenty seconds
.

“Matthew,” whispered
Mata Hari
in his mind. “This is an unstable strategic situation. I recommend immediate system departure.”

“No! It’s not necessary. Surely your systems aren’t overloaded?”

“No. But the probability of significant damage is high.”

“How high?”

“Four percent.”

He stutter-laughed so fast Eliana didn’t even hear him. “Four percent! For a human those are negligible odds.”

“Not for an AI,” said Mata Hari
,
her soft feminine voice now replaced by a harder, male-sounding tone.
Where had that come from?
Inside him, inside ship, the Restricted Rooms glowed with power. Had the voice come from there?

Thirty-two seconds
.

Suddenly, he had it. “Swerve around Halcyon,
Mata Hari
.
Keep the planet’s bulk between us and
Obliteration
.”

“Why?” She was back to her
Mata Hari persona, sounding like her normal-self.

“You’ll see. How close can this ship get to Halcyon and still go into Alcubierre Translation . . . without throwing the planet out of orbit?”

Forty seconds
.

“One point three planetary radii of Halcyon,”
Mata Hari
said, sounding very curious.

“Prepare a Translation solution for such a departure.”

She burned bright in his mind. “What star?”

“No star,” he said, wondering if this gamble would cost him his life. “Reset for Translation appearance directly behind
Obliteration
. . . and on the same inbound vector.”

Fifty seconds
.

Mata Hari
went silent, figuring the vector math. For Matt,
ocean-time
filled him. Datafeeds flooded every sense. He took it all in—from the ship, from nearby space, from Zeus Station as Ioannis desperately called for help, and even from Halcyon as Eliana’s minisats picked up surface explosions in several places around Tree Melisen. Everyone was in trouble, including him. His Interfaces trembled, nearing overload.

One minute ten seconds
.

In his mind,
Mata Hari
came back front and center. She appeared once more as the Victorian-dressed Mata Hari, her manner formal and demanding. “Matthew, why take such a chance?”

What the hell?
All of a sudden she’d gotten very argumentative with him. And there was no time to waste. “Because, partner, Legion is obviously trying to wrap up his problems very quickly. Remember Dreedle’s tachyonic call for help to the Anarchate base? I bet a Nova-class Anarchate battleglobe is already on the way here. Legion wants to have his pets in place, able to say he was not interfering in planetary affairs, before the Nova arrives. Doing this maneuver will throw him off and allow us more time to attack. Plus keep him from achieving immediate success. Understood?”

“A novel solution.”
Mata Hari
sounded intrigued. “The Translation algorithm is completed. We’re inside the orbit of Zeus Station.
Obliteration
has closed to within twenty planetary diameters. The energy wavefront from his beam weapons has dissipated, but new attacks are likely. Do we pass through atmosphere?”

“No.” In one part of his mind, a VR helmeted Eliana moved fingers quickly over an AllCall datapad, her expression distracted as she took in multiplex data feeds fed to her by those subversive minisats. Her face was filled with worry, doubt and a little hope. He hoped too. “Commence maneuver.”

One minute twenty seconds
.

The ship moved sideways, using the gravity well of Halcyon to speed up a little. Behind it followed the ravening furies of
Obliteration
, reaching out with directed energy beam weapons to attack their flanks. Their foe ejected more and more Nanoshells to distract their shipboard defenses, all the while searching for a chink in the protective armor of counterstrike, confusion, decoys and random explosions which
Mata Hari ’s
Tactical CPU hurled back at the intruder. Matt was holding the antimatter cannons in reserve, for just before they lost direct line of sight. For a brief moment, he was tempted to use the Bethe Inducer, a weapon that could make a star go nova—but such were not used near an inhabited planet. Or an inhabited space station.

“We are nearing the sunside of Halcyon,”
Mata Hari
whispered to him over the PET relay as he sat in the Pit, his skin alive to thousands of lightbeam inputs, feeling old, feeling wrung out and exhausted. “Out of direct line-of-sight in four seconds.”

“Fire the antimatter cannons!”

They fired.

Thick black beams of coherent neutron antimatter moved at lightspeed, clawing for the Mican’s ship. Unfortunately, they did not connect.

Obliteration
shifted aside, just before the antimatter beams passed by the Halicene’s portside flank. They missed.
Damn!

Two minutes twenty seconds
.

No one could see antimatter beams coming . . . until they hit, since the beams moved at the speed of light. But one could dedicate a few Probes for use as tachyonic sensors, able to signal back any eruption of antimatter beams from his ship. Tachyons always beat light. It was a very expensive investment, but Legion must have done it. In his mind and in the holosphere, the alien battleship swung back on course. Something glittered on the hull just as the enemy ship neared Zeus Station. Were they firing on Ioannis? Or was a Halicene shuttle leaving to claim the station for Nikolaos?

Two minutes thirty seconds
.

They passed out of direct sight of Legion.

Step-down
.

Muscles ache.

Head throbs.

Heart skips a beat.

Interface drag is part and parcel of being a cyborg, even when your biochemistry is altered. Finally . . . finally, he felt human again. Normal. And very slow. He turned to Eliana.

“Patron, now you will see what a Vigilante and a Dreadnought-class starship can do!”

His love turned to him, then pulled off the VR helmet. Her expression was hopeful. “Good! I just used up the last of your minisats. We’re going to survive?”

“Matthew, five seconds to Translation point,” called
Mata Hari’s unhurried, fully feminine voice.

“Probably.” He blew Eliana a kiss, feeling wild and crazy. She looked surprised, then pleased. “We’re definitely going to surprise Legion and maybe cook his pants. If Micans even wear clothes.”

“They don’t,” Mata Hari
said in a wry aside as the Alcubierre Translation algorithm built up in the NavTactical computer. “Prepare for Translation.”

Eliana sat back in her accel-couch. Its crash-arms closed in again on her. With a trusting look to him, she closed her eyes.

In the Pit, Matt felt the inertial fields come on, pressing him into his own 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 Translation while still in Cyborg-link with his ship. He’d never done it before. But Matt had no choice. He must be completely alert and aware when they materialized behind
Obliteration
. He had a surprise he wanted to try out.

“Translating!”

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.

It was too much. Far, far too much.

He fainted.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Awareness came. Matt felt groggy and half-blind, as if he were a blind man moving through clinging waters, slowed down, weighed down, as if he climbed up out of the kind of dream where you observe but cannot move.

His heart surged inside him. His mind expanded quickly. Suddenly, he was back in
ocean-time
, a cyborg in link with his AI and their ship, no longer unconscious. The faint had lasted less than a second.

He took in the full StratTac feed from
Mata Hari
.

They had materialized five planetary diameters behind
Obliteration
, rocking it with the gravity pulse from their Translation, throwing the enemy ship off kilter for a few critical seconds.

In the space of that time Matt acted. He took in the Tactical plot, fired the hydrogen-
fluorine metal-punch lasers, followed them up with a heavy proton beamer onslaught, launched plasma torps that would arrive very slowly, and then topped it off with a fusillade from the neutron antimatter cannons just as the pontoons finished rotating back forward. Was it enough?

In the holosphere, the image of
Obliteration
shifted a bit as
Mata Hari
threw them sideways, expecting an autonomic response from the battleship’s flank energy beamers and hypersonic missile pods. Their own lightbeam barrage resumed, in pulses of ravening photons, protons and antimatter neutrons. Then mercury vapor mist took silvery form between them and
Obliteration
as hypersonic Nanoshells reached out ahead of
Mata Hari,
setting up their own screen. Holes opened in it erratically. Even now the enemy probably fired back at them. They would have felt the instantaneous gravity waves of
Mata Hari’s
Translation and figured someone unfriendly now trailed them . . . and on the same vector plot as the gravity waves. At least, that’s what Matt would have figured.

In two light-seconds, the first of their energy beams impacted on
Obliteration
.

Eliana covered her eyes as brilliant light glared.

Matt watched at slow Human speeds even as he thought at photonic speeds.

The HF laser beams cut a huge, gaping hole in the southern hemisphere of
Obliteration’s
hull, but did not get all the way through the ablative armor plating. The heavy proton beams followed, cutting deeper still. The plasma torps were slow, far too slow. They were passed in flight by his lightspeed neutron antimatter beams. Two black beams hit an outer limb of
Obliteration
just as—in the field image sent back by a tachyonic sensorProbe he’d seeded into the attacking cloud of his own Nanoshells before Translation—the alien starship tried to rotate and change location, hoping to throw off the focus of his beam weapons.

It didn’t move fast enough.

One quarter of the enemy battleship simply vanished in a total matter-to-energy conversion. The blast threw
Obliteration
sideways. Half its beam projectors shut down as energy feeds to three quarters of its surface vanished or dropped precipitously.
Damn!
The AM blast had been only a glancing blow. Maybe it was enough. Maybe . . . .

The plasma torps arrived.

Most were knocked out by short-range KKPs that were any starship’s last line of defense against solid projectiles. But enough got through. A ravening cloud of purple plasma gas ate away at the battleship’s interior, biting inward, seeking the central fusion bottle that provided primary power to the ship’s engines and battlegear. Suddenly,
Obliteration
lurched sideways.

Then it split in two.

Amazed, Matt watched as the northern half of the
Obliteration
blew explosive clamps and separated from the crippled southern half. He’d heard of such Dual ships, but they were a recent innovation he’d not expected in Sigma Puppis system. But here it was. And it looked as if the northern half-globe had maneuvering power and a fair offensive capability. Meanwhile, Matt’s second lightbeam barrage hit the southern half-globe, staggering it. Then his Nanoshells penetrated the drifting hulk, met the remaining energy nodes, overloaded them, and caused the hulk to blow apart. A spectacular plasma cloud flared with energies that lit up the electromagnetic spectrum.