Free Anarchate Vigilante (Vigilante Series 4) by T. Jackson King Page A

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