Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (3 page)

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
ocean-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
::,
a group entity that could think, move and act faster than any organic lifeform.

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.

Sitting in the glass chair, 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. Matt smothered a chuckle and focused on his Patron, who now sat to his rear.

She was a highly educated, high born young woman who’d journeyed out-system to find a savior for her people. That took bravery, and perhaps wisdom. Was her brisk manner just a cover for her first trip outside her home star system? Or a defensive shield against being hurt? Or perhaps a persona she adopted because of the patriarchal control of her society by the Greek males who ran the colony’s Trade companies? Should he make allowances for a woman nearly as exotic to others as he must be to her?

Perhaps he should.

But would Eliana do the same for him? For instance, did she mind his nudity? With perfect climate control on most human starships, shipboard nudity was common. However, he sat nude because Mata Hari said human skin was his most extensive sense organ—with an average surface area of twenty-three square feet—and she wanted the maximum contact area for optical lightbeam neurolinking.