Eliana started forward. “I am—”
“Stop!”
Matt overrode Suit’s Fire-command to a bicep shell as she reached two meters range, just beyond the alcove’s flat metal table. Eliana Themistocles’ white face tightened over high, aristocratic cheekbones. She seemed frightened now, staring morbidly at Suit as its external systems flashed brightly. Like a deadly peacock.
“Keep your distance,” Matt said through the helmet’s external speaker. He controlled the sound level—no need to vibe her bones. “State your purpose.”
Shivering, the Patron focused those needful green eyes on him. “Hey—we had an appointment, didn’t we?” He said nothing, just watched; her air of authority wilted a bit. “I—my Clan family that is—we’re looking for a Vigilante. You were listed on the Job Board. So I messaged you.”
“Your problem?”
Eliana scowled. “An off-world Trade conglomerate is breaking the terms of a mining agreement that we and our Derindl Nest-mates signed with them.” She paused, then licked her lips. “May I sit?”
“No.” Around them, other aliens were taking notice of two humanoids in the same room—an unusual circumstance considering the rarity of the bipedal lifeform. Matt did not enjoy being the focus of someone else’s attention. Nor staying in one place so long. But a Job . . . . He extruded a gauntlet knife-claw and touched a pressure stud on the table, then looked back to Eliana.
“Come inside the Privacy Curtain field, but stay at least two meters away from me.”
“What?” Eliana looked puzzled, then irritated as the Curtain turned opaque in front of her. The Curtain had become a one-way transmitter of photons, allowing Matt to see her but blocking the vision of the alien critters that filled Wiggles. She shrugged, then stepped through the Curtain’s electromagnetic field and halted on the other side of the table, standing still with both arms at her side, at 1.8 meters distance. Sweat lined the inside of her palms. Suit’s Threat systems keened loudly, unhappy with such a close approach. He slapped his chest control panel, hitting the correct pressure stud the first time—as always.
“Shut up!”
Eliana’s expression stiffened. “Are you speaking to me?”
“No!” The keening died away as Matt reset the size of Suit’s Threat zone. “Just this damned Suit! It doesn’t like closeness—too threatening.”
Still standing, Eliana smiled thinly. “And you? Do you dislike closeness with other sapients? Is that why you’re outfitted like a miniature battleship?”
Matt braced his gauntleted hands against the tabletop, as if he could push away the memories. Did he fear closeness? After Helen? Hey—he could be close! What other human could claim the unique meeting of the minds shared between him and the self-aware entity that was starship Mata Hari ? A symbiosis they were, quite rare in the records of space-faring peoples. But sometimes, very rarely, an organic could bond with an inorganic and know a life too strange for words. The two of them roamed a galaxy where for most the only purpose was survival. But when he, Mata Hari the AI, and the starship Mata Hari became one electro-optical entity, became
“None of your business, Eliana Antigone Themistocles.” From her eyes, pity came. Then she stared at him with a different look, using those little girl eyes on him. Eyes that touched him, made him feel . . . made him wish . . . . “Explain your Purpose further.”
Eliana blinked, abandoning deeper thoughts. “As I said, we seek a Vigilante. The Trade group has employed a strip-miner the size of this station to rip out our minerals without regard to the local environment—all contrary to the contract terms. When our people approach, they are killed. We have few ships. And the MotherShip of the Trade conglomerate refuses entrance to our envoys. Our only alternative is destruction of the MotherShip or the Stripper.”
“The group’s name?”
She looked rueful, ivory teeth biting her lower lip. “The Halicene Conglomerate.”
Shit! Matt cared little who he fought, and only a little more who he helped. A Job was a job. He and Mata-Hari seemed well-suited to fighting hopeless causes, righting wrongs, helping the weak, and in general getting in the way of evolutionary survival. Kill or be killed. Be smart or be dead. Be alert or be enslaved—so he had learned while roaming the Anarchate. The rules of natural selection worked at the galactic level too, in addition to planetary ecosystems. But it gave him some purpose, fighting lost causes. However, fighting the Halicene Conglomerate wasn’t a cause, it was stupid. Just plain stupid.
“The Halicene Conglomerate controls half of Orion Arm. How could you people have been so stupid as to hire them?”
“Bastard!” Eliana trembled with fury. “No one else would give us credit! We needed full spectrum neonatal placental units to serve as wombs for our crossbreed zygotes—so we could bring them to full-term.” Tears flickered in her jade green eyes. “The survival of the colony was at stake.”
Matt closed his own eyes, feeling very weary, yet secure in the knowledge Suit would alert him to any Threat. What to do? He needed a Patron. But not a credit-poor Patron. And not one so incredibly shortsighted. He needed a Cause, but not one equivalent to walking into a plasma torch. However, he was tired of hanging around Hagonar Station, a distinctive target for any genome harvester willing to take a chance on harvesting his DNA for sale to the highest bidder. Like the overconfident crab alien. Still . . . . Matt opened his eyes.
“Eliana, I wish I could help you but—”
“Threat!” screamed Suit as subsonic klaxons and pulsing red lights filled his Eyes-Up display.
Beyond his faceplate, movement occurred under the dim orange light of Wiggles.
Against the far wall of the dive moved something like a giant praying mantis insect, but loaded down with body armor, a tubular weapon, and a glass-globe helmet set atop a toothy head that sported too many eyes. This something had just lumbered upright. Its own pulse-Doppler radar now ranged his alcove, penetrating the Privacy Curtain like tissue-paper. A laser rangefinder sought entry past the Curtain, defeated only because of the Curtain’s opacity setting. Options scrolled over Matt’s faceplate.
Eliana leaned forward, her look anxious. “Dragoneaux, will you—”
“Drop!”
She dropped under the table.
In sync and on-line with a super-strong combat suit that feels like your own body is wonderful. It’s ecstatic. And so very dangerous to one’s opponents.
Matt stood up so quickly his armor bent the table’s edge. Nullgrav plates in his boots shot him up towards the ceiling. Both shoulder pulse-cannons whirred On Target. The lightspeed link with Suit that he called ocean-time flooded his senses. He thought fast. Faster than humanly possible. Picoseconds blurred past. Nanoseconds zipped along. Milliseconds ticked by, slowly.
Forty milliseconds passed in the outside world, Suit informed him.
Mr. Threat reared backwards, squalling something, a midbody chitin-arm lifting a weapon tube towards Matt.
Two hundred milliseconds stomped along.
He PET thought-imaged rapidly in a coded series.
Six hundred milliseconds lumbered by.
Green light flared as one of Matt’s laser pulse-cannons pierced the alien’s combat armor and sliced through Mr. Threat’s head and midbody thorax, unleashing a dark ichor. The other cannon beam sliced off the weapon-arm.
Nine hundred milliseconds neared a second.
“KABLAMMM!” Three HEDS rocket shells stitched the lower carapace of Mr. Threat.
One second happened.
A pressor beam flared out from the top of Matt’s helmet, pushing the alien against the dive’s back wall.
One and a quarter seconds moved slowly.
Matt stopped rising and hovered just below the ceiling.
A helmet tractor beam tore at Mr. Threat’s extremities, pulling off legs and multi-arms the way a school kid might dissect a fly.
> Two seconds had passed since Matt entered ocean-time.
A volley of Fire-and-Forget Nanoshells raced across the room, already programmed for the infrared signature of Mr. Threat, each shell able to twist and turn in flight as miniature vernier jets steered them after every dying twitch and jerk. They were relentless. They were deadly. And they usually got their prey before their high-acceleration fuel sputtered out.
Three seconds moved slowly by.
Light. Sound. Smell. Confusion.
They all filled Wiggles’ gloomy shadows as other aliens dove under furniture, exited rapidly, put their own combat exoskeletons on Alert, or simply watched from beside the stone bar.
Suit lowered him back down to his private alcove as Mr. Threat’s chitin-skin erupted with miniature borers, carried by the Nanoshells, borers that systematically penetrated its body like drill bits through wood. Biogel poisons specific to carbon-based lifeforms also poured out, overloading a dying multiple-heart system. Electronic white noise overwhelmed Mr. Threat’s own combat exoskeleton programming—using miniature emitters carried by the Nanoshells—thus diverting any attempt by its Tactical programming to carry out preprogrammed offensive actions despite the death of its organic host.
Finally, with a flare of actinic red light, the organic shell of Mr. Threat imploded in on itself as the nanoware energy-seekers made contact with the alien suit’s power sources and overloaded them, burning up hardware systems and their organic host at the same time. Just as his boots touched the alcove floor, Suit’s onboard CPU displayed the factory-type and model of Mr. Threat’s combat exoskeleton. Halicene Conglomerate, Thix-model, Level Three Enforcer. Damn! He shivered as he thought-blinked and left ocean-time, resuming the slow thought-talk-movement speed normal to most people. He slowed in order to communicate with his new Patron.
Matt ripped the table aside, looking down at a very frightened Eliana. “We’re safe—for the moment.” She stood up shakily, then looked out into the bar at the piles of red-gleaming debris that had once been a living being. “Did anyone from Halcyon or Sigma Puppis know you were coming here?”
Eliana looked at him as if he were brain-dead. “Of course! Half the colony knew we needed a Vigilante.”
“Great. Just great.” Matt looked around Wiggles; the divemaster was already replacing broken glassware as a cleanbot sucked in the remains of his recent antagonist. Still, the air felt heavy, oppressive. He’d been here, in one place, far too long. Long enough, at least, for Mr. Threat to track him down. Or to follow Eliana to him. It was definitely time to get back on board Mata Hari. He turned to her.
Eliana Themistocles seemed to be who and what she stated. Her problem was only too familiar to him. The plight of her world was critical—unconstrained strip mining of even part of the planet’s crust would poison its rivers and lakes with heavy metals for centuries, perhaps critically unbalancing its ecosystem and throwing the whole lifeweb into ecoshock. Either Halicene Conglomerate had to leave, or the colony must leave. The two could not coexist. At last, a real Job. He sighed. Maybe he had genes for stupidity—or lost causes.
“Patron, that was an Enforcer for Halicene Conglomerate. Do your people worry them enough to send an assassin after you?”
Eliana’s pale face froze. She stammered. “Uh, uh, yes—maybe, I don’t know!” Frustration creased her young woman’s face, still unlined by scars, dead hopes and lost loves. “But on the passenger freighter I took to get here, I used standard Screening techniques.”
“What line?”
“Agonon-Thet.”
Matt considered. That was not a starline owned by Halicene Conglomerate, so far as he knew. Black intelligence was expensive, especially when it came to knowledge of the regional heavies. But Suit had its own expert intelligence systems able to sift and sort through a thousand rumors, and Mata Hari ’s databanks could never be filled. What else they contained he had no idea since the ship refused to say why she had been built by the ancient T’Chak aliens, and limited his access to some parts of the ship. But Mata Hari had never failed to answer his combat questions. Perhaps only the freighter’s ship captain had been bought—not the entire starline. He eyed Eliana.
“What payment do you offer?”
Her face brightened. “You’ll help us?”
“Mistress, you seek Justice, which the Anarchate has no interest in. To obtain Justice, Patrons hire a Vigilante. Like me. But I work for pay—my talents are not free. Your assets?”
She frowned. “What barter currency do you accept?”
Time. Too much time spent in one place. “I refuse payment in clones, brainpacs, drugs, plague viruses, and psychosis-inducing software. I accept unique gems, deuterium hydroxide fuel, germanium integrated circuits, molecular memory crystals, expert system algorithms, designer proteins, polytonal music, gold, rare earths, and handmade art objects. Quickly!”
Eliana smiled softly. “An ethical Vigilante. How interesting.” She sobered. “We can offer raw germanium, molecular memory crystals, unique biologicals based on alkaloid anti-virals, designer proteins and direct genetic manipulation waldo machinery. Satisfactory?”
From the far side of Wiggles the divemaster watched Matt’s private alcove a bit too intently—as best he could tell from the slant of the alien’s podeyes. Matt blinked once, alerting Mata Hari that he was returning, and with a guest.
“That is satisfactory, Patron Themistocles,” he said sourly. “Now, let’s get the hell out of here. Two bipeds together always draws a crowd.”
“Which way?” she said, looking around confusedly, appearing disoriented by the combat.
“Out! Out of here,” he said, waving for her to lead the way. “Move it.”
Eliana scowled, her look a promise that she would surely unload on him her opinion of such abrupt behavior, and far sooner than he wished. But she turned and headed out the main entrance of Wiggles. Matt stumped out after her, entering a main arterial hallway, with Suit on full Alert status. No one bothered them as they headed for Dock Seven and starship Mata Hari.
Watching Eliana’s buttocks move underneath the fabric of her vacsuit reminded him how long it had been since he’d made love to a woman. Virtual reality graphics, memories of Helen, and a few faded holo pictures were not enough. Not nearly enough. He needed more. But without the closeness. Too much closeness hurt. Too much caring hurt. So fate had taught him.
He had a Job to do. Only a job. Then he would move on.
But Matt could not escape a niggling question, something provoked by Eliana’s earlier closeness comment.
Did Suit just protect him—or did it really do more? Did it . . . did it offer him a convenient shield against his emotions, his loss, and his need for someone to care for him? Could Eliana be that someone?
Never!
She was just a human-alien hybrid, and an albino at that. Whilst he was a human-cyborg symbiont. They had nothing in common. Nothing at all.
Matt Dragoneaux stumped along the hallway at one with Suit, a cyborg once more alone . . . except for a whispering voice in the back of his mind, a voice that said— “Even a Vigilante can find love.”
Maybe.
But first they had to survive.
CHAPTER TWO
On the Bridge of Mata Hari, still docked to Hagonar Station, 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 self-aware computer mind and starship talked to him. And how he talked back. Matt’s bare skin soaked in thousands of lightbeam inputs that talked to his skin, inputs that came from the control devices that lined the cone-shaped Interlock Pit. Light moved so much faster than electrons-down-a-wire, 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 o
cean-time the first time he’d gone on-line with the feminine Mata Hari mind persona that was also a self-aware starship. That persona presented Matt with the mind-image of a Victorian-dressed, amber-skinned young woman with long black hair piled atop her head. 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. In-link with Mata Hari was more than the out loud talking used by Standard organics. It felt like a continuous electrocution, but one which did not burn him out. Together they were the symbiosis
He’d tried explaining it to Eliana, when first she’d seen him enter the Bridge, exit from 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. Even a twitch of fingers, groin, or feet would do. He controlled the levels of adrenaline, signaling with his body, a puppet on lightbeam strings who talked back to the puppetmaster.
She’d never seen the like.
Nor had she approved.
Matt dismissed vain wishes and inspected his home. Tier upon tier of devices lined the cone walls, each linked to him by coherent lightbeams. There were microminiaturized sensors, analyzers, Command/Control/Communication modules, flat-screen displays, holo-projectors, neurolink jack-in ports, optical fiber cable bundles, and “things” . . . things of amorphous shape and grey gleaming surfaces that he knew nothing about. Just that they were part of the ship’s control apparatus as designed by the long-extinct T’Chak aliens, the makers of Mata Hari. So the ship had told him—with her fine, feminine sense of irony.
Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) Page 2