Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (41 page)

Before he could argue, Eliana broke in. “Brother, I’m not coming home.”

“What!” screamed Ioannis.

Shock hit him.

Within the glass Isolation Chamber, Matt turned to Eliana. She stood there trembling, hands jammed into her pockets. She faced him resolutely, with her emotional guard let down—her love for him shining more brightly than a laser penetrates the darkness.

“Eliana?”

“Matttt.” Her lips trembled.  “You said . . . you said you loved me. When you said that, I was confused. Worried about other duties. Other obligations. Now . . . I said it once, I will say it again.” She blinked as tears appeared. “I love you too.”

“Eliana! I am damaged. Badly.”

“Matthew,” she said hurriedly. “We need each other. We’re good for each other. We heal each other. We love each other. And I will work with
Mata Hari’s Biolab machinery to find a cure to this cursed virus! Give yourself a chance! Give
us
a chance!”

Oh, gods of Chaos!

In the background, Ioannis roared, his words meaningless to Matt, irrelevant to the love that filled him.

He reached out to her. The armorglass stopped him, reminding him of his disease.

Diseased. That’s what he was. Married to a machine as much as Eliana was married to the Trees of Halcyon, they were two incompatible beings. And if he ever touched her again, skin to skin, he would infect her with Legion’s slow virus.

Never!

He could never visit such a curse on her. Shaking his head, he moved backward in the Decontam Chamber, head down, eyes fixed on the metal floorplates. They were grey, like his future.

“We can’t be together. I would infect you.”

“Matthew!”

Isolation enveloped him. Isolation protected him, better than Suit had. No touch came within. None went without. Forever would he be a cyborg . . . in touch only with another machine.

The armorglass cracked and spiderwebbed to a tremendous impact.

Matt looked up.

Eliana held in her hand a KKP gun.

She must have had it in her coat pocket all this time. Hidden from him and ignored by a Changing
Mata Hari
.
She aimed to the side so he wouldn’t be hit, and fired a second time.

Mata Hari
hadn’t interfered. Perhaps because she had not aimed at him. Perhaps because his symbiont was so involved in the inner changes with the Restricted Rooms. For whatever reason, the KKP charge had struck his isolation chamber. The armorglass stood before him, badly fractured.

Like his life.

Like his heart.

She threw the gun at the fractured glass.

It broke into pieces.

A hole appeared, one big enough for a hand to enter.

Eliana ran forward, reaching out.

“No!” he screamed.

“Yes!” She reached through the hole and touched him. “I love you.” Her tears gone, her expression determined, she grabbed for his hand. “Matthew, I’ve made my choice. I choose to be with you for as long as you live. For as long as we both live!”

Matt gripped back her hand, his fingers intertwining with her fingers. Looking up, he saw the voiceless fury of Ioannis. With a blink and a thought, he canceled the image, sending Eliana’s brother back to the snake pit of his political machinations.

“Eliana,” he whispered. “I love you too.”

“Matthew!” She smiled fiercely.

For a moment, he believed life might yet be fair. That there could be hope for such as them. Hope . . .

The ship shook.

Internally, in his cross-connected cyborg systems, Matt felt Mata Hari
flare its fusion thrusters, change vectors, and push out of parking orbit. Away from the onrushing shapes of Anarchate Inspection Golems. In the distance, the menacing black globe of the Nova now moved toward them. An inbound Emergency All-Hail signaled to him, demanding immediate cessation of movement . . . or they would be destroyed.

“
Mata Hari! Resume parking orbit!” said the signal from the Anarchate battleglobe.

“Matthew?” Still holding his hand through the breached canister, Eliana looked up to the ceiling. “What’s happening?”

“I will not obey you.” Mata Hari
said to the battleglobe in the hard-sounding male voice, a warrior’s voice bereft of feminine softness, caring or empathy.
What the?
The Decontam Chamber dissolved suddenly as the ship depolarized its matter, throwing him and Eliana together. They stood now in the middle of the Biolab, no longer isolated from each other, but facing something he’d never faced before—a mutinous AI. Or . . . was it a ship with two minds, one of which had only now come online after who knew how many years of silence?

Matt spoke and thought simultaneously. “Self-Correct Routine A64 Prime Aleph.” Dimly he recalled his early lessons with
Mata Hari,
after its rescue of his lifepod.

Nothing happened.

“Matt?” Eliana said uncertainly. “What’s going on?”

“Trouble.” He hugged her close. “The ship’s moving out of orbit. The Nova is preparing to fire on us.”

“Matt!”

He shared her fear. He tried again. Cyborg that he was, Matt still perceived all external space images and all internal ship systems. He image-thought explicit orders under the lightbeams that touched him. Optical neurolink had never failed him.

His efforts affected nothing.

Nothing happened in the Drive power rooms. Nothing happened in the Core NavBanks. Matt could perceive everything that now happened, but was cut off from all influence on his partner.

A living ship.

He’d forgotten that. That it was alive, with a will of its own. Or, rather, with two wills and two personas. And the one he knew as
Mata Hari had disappeared? To where?

All about them the ship’s flexmetal deck and wallplates rippled, flowed, assumed new shapes, and moved him, Eliana and the Biolab somewhere else. Deeper into the inner core of
Mata Hari
,
far away from the Bridge and the Spine. Where was it taking them?

The lights went out.

“Maaatt!”

“It’s all right! I’m with you. Hold on tight!”

She clutched at him. Together, they held onto each other, a cyborg and a crossbreed with too much hope.

In the neurolinked senses of his mind, Matt felt deeply this new Change as a new mind modified the T’Chak Dreadnought he had once thought of as his friend and partner.

Like a sleeping hawk who suddenly takes wing, his ship unfolded all of its weaponry capabilities. And not just the weapons he knew about. Things of unimaginable power and ferocity were coming on-line. Compared to these things, appearing by the will of
Mata Hari
herself, Matt felt the weapons he’d earlier used were puny. Like an ancient .45 automatic pistol compared to his laser Magnum. Or more accurately, to his plasma torps. 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. The Restricted Rooms lay open to his gaze. Marvels lay inside.

Matt entered, cataloguing each new wonder.

In place of his old Bethe Inducer that could make a sun go nova, on-line came a quark-based graviton field. This field could literally compress any sun into a neutron star just kilometers in size, while forcing its photosphere outward. Outward as wave after tidal wave of sterilizing radiation. Planets would crisp within that caress.

Next to the quark-field loomed something else. Something that did not exist fully in this space-time. Something that only glowed. Glowed with escaping neutrinos. He had no idea what it was.

In a different Room lay something Matt did recognize. 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.

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. What? Suddenly, he placed the weird feeling.
Translation disorientation!
Somehow, these pods contained the ability to project Alcubierre pocket universes—just like the main drive. But why?

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 its 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.

Lastly, and most terribly, he felt the new mind appear from deep within the stygian depths of
Mata Hari.
A mind unlike the normal, reasonable persona of Mata Hari
.
This mind matched the hard-toned warrior-male voice he’d been hearing more and more lately. It felt like a . . . a BattleMind. Compared to it, Mata Hari’s normal persona seemed pale and uncertain.

Trembling, he thought his query. “Who are you?”

With but a minor feed from its powerful central cortex, the BattleMind answered him . . . as simultaneously it moved across the femtoseconds to confront an Anarchate Nova-class battleglobe. Like far distant tolling bells, Matt sensed and heard the Threat alarms and Option presentations. The Anarchate’s black globe had sensed his ship’s Change, powered up its own systems, and now shot toward them, scattering tiny Inspection Golems the way a shark scatters minnows.

Doom impended.

“Who am I?” spoke a bell-like voice. “I am BattleMind. Also Destruction Device Six Hundred and Forty-Seven, of the 94th Imperial Dynast of the T’Chak Imperium, late of the Magellanic shipyards and the Lacunae Mindworks.”

Ohhhh, shit.

Eliana had heard. He could tell by the way she trembled as they held each other. They shook with cold—besides the lights, Mata Hari
had also cut off the local enviro-controls and anything else that used energy which it could bring to bear on the Nova. Matt tried again.

“Where is . . . my
Mata Hari?”

A buffeting roar of crude laughter shook him, both mentally and physically as its answer rebounded off the Biolab walls. “Your
Mata Hari? How amusing. She was an autonomous mind that I created and placed in the Bridge, though she did not know it or know the purpose of the areas you labeled Restricted Rooms. It was necessary to present a persona that could pass unchallenged in these strange star fields. That job is now completed and she has been confined to her Memory Pillars.” Puzzlement briefly touched the BattleMind’s voice. “It has been too long since the T’Chak visited this part of the galaxy. My task is clear. Defeat this unit outside and return home with a Threat status report. I am expected.”

“Idiot!” Eliana screamed her frustration. “It’s been two hundred thousand years
since anyone heard from the T’Chak! There’s no one
left
to report home to! They are all gone from the Small Magellanic Cloud.”

“Gone?” Matt felt the BattleMind recede a little. “You are mistaken. Do you think your species are the only ones capable of stasis? My masters await me, slumbering in stasis. Of that I am certain. Their last signal came from just outside the place you call the
Small Magellanic Cloud.”

“How long ago came the signal?” Eliana said frantically. “Maybe you’re just an insane algorithm, still following orders from beings long dead, who cared not for you!”

In his mind, Matt felt doubt loom inside the new
Mata Hari.
But only briefly. Inside the BattleMind, that doubt died quickly. “I have my Mission. I have my Duty. Those are enough. And anyway, in time, I will return to the resting place of my Masters, report to them and invite them to refute your lie. Now be quiet. I have work to do.”

“Please,” Matt said before BattleMind fully withdrew. “Give us lights, heat and a view of the attack. If we are to die, at least let us see it happen.”

“Die?” A receding laugh echoed their way. “Hardly. This unit cannot defeat me. Watch and learn.”

Lights came on. Eliana’s long black hair fluttered to a blast of warm air. His
yukata
robe dropped from the ceiling and Matt put it on. A holosphere appeared. Around them, side-by-side accel-couches rose up from the flexmetal floor. They fell into them, but still held each other’s hand. Eliana turned to him.

“Matt!” She pulled his head close and kissed him.

He kissed her back. “Eliana. My Eliana.”

New determination filled her pale face. “I am yours. You are mine. We are together now. And we will defeat both the slow virus and this . . . aberration that has displaced your
Mata Hari!”