Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (8 page)

“Options?” said Eliana, sounding frustrated. “Why don’t you just go directly to Halcyon and destroy the Stripper from orbit? This ship has the weapons. Do you lack the courage?”

Matt did not look up. “Eliana, what if the Stripper contains mutant retroviruses genetically tailored to block the photosynthetic action of your Mother Trees? What if an obvious attack on the Stripper yields only the total despoliation of your planet?”

“Oh!” she said with surprise. “I hadn’t considered that. Matt, I’m sorry—”

“No more apologies,” he said firmly, turning around in his glass chair to meet her face to face. “You know nothing of this ship, of its capabilities, of my link with Mata Hari
,
or my personal ethics. Now please, be quiet. I have work to do.” He turned back.

Ocean-time
flowed over him with almost a gentle caress.

Three hundred milliseconds
.

Leaning forward, his skin rippled autonomically, sending off signals to all parts of the ship. Time to work. Time to move in-system, to launch Remote probes, and to Dock with Zeus Station. Data flooded into him. Dimensions enfolded him. Strange senses caressed him.

But far, far away in a closed part of his mind, Matt considered Eliana. Deep inside, at the memory pain level, something whispered that maybe this beautiful, well-educated albino woman knew something he didn’t. Knew how to be a real human, knew how to feel like a human ought to feel . . . even if she were half-alien.

Biting his lip, Matt concentrated on the work at hand. Work always helped. Work cleared his mind, usually. But locks never stay locked. Like an ocean tide, emotions washed over him. Emotions from a dark, distant time. A time when he had not been a cyborg. When he’d been just a man . . . a man loved by a woman who cared for him.

Seven hundred thirteen milliseconds
.

Zeus Station loomed large in the holosphere.

It didn’t look particularly hostile. Just a long cylinder pockmarked with Dock ports and sporting seven different bioenvironments, each with their own artificial gravity regimes. Docking went smoothly and normally.

Matt left
Mata Hari
encased in the bulky shell of Suit, its CPU updated with datafeeds on all the species resident in the station. Eliana walked ahead of him, striding down a narrow Dock corridor dressed only in a vacsuit and a troubled attitude. She’d chosen to make the vacsuit appear silvery, using electrocharge control to rearrange the suit’s molecules. Like a human mirror she stalked along the corridor, reflecting back the weirdly distorted images of nearby sapients, bar/dives, pumps, airlock control panels, and the red slashmark letters of Belizel, the Anarchate language. Nothing came into her suit and no sign of her personality left it. He wondered if she had always been so defensive, so wary of connecting with others. What was she afraid of?

They stopped before a large pressure lock leading to the Transport tubeways. The winding tubeways pumped people and packages from one end of the station to another like blood cells in a circulation system. With gravity fields generated as needed and bioenvironments tailored to specific requirements, a kilometers-long Trade Station like Zeus functioned like a very complex organism. Matt watched as Eliana touched a wall datapad and tapped in a coded sequence.

Above her head, a flat vid-display imaged on. A grey-haired man with a saturnine face scowled down at her. “Yes?” he said in demotic Greek, which Suit’s comdisk quickly translated.

“Grandfather Petros! It’s Eliana—don’t you recognize me?”

The man slowly smiled. “Eliana? Is it you behind that mirror? We had thought—”

“No! I survived Creon’s machinations.” She acted nervous, even a bit guilty-looking. “Uh, I’ve returned with a Vigilante. Someone who will solve all our problems. Does Ioannis still sit on the Dais of Power?”

“He does.” The old man looked aside, staring at Matt. Despite his own opaque faceplate, ancient eyes seemed to read him even better than Mata Hari
.
Eliana’s grandfather Petros pursed his lips. “A Vigilante? Good. Is he powerful?”

“Very,” Eliana said. “More than I expected.”

“Oh?” Petros looked suddenly alert. “Well, what do you need?”

“To see Ioannis,” she said. “The Vigilante—he calls himself Matt Dragoneaux—would speak with my brother about Halcyon, the Halicene Conglomerate, and how we may rid ourselves of its Stripper.”

On-screen, Petros sat back in a flexchair, the very image of an elderly patriarch who knew how to keep his own counsel. “Ioannis will return to the Dais in a few minutes. I’m sending a taxi tube for you. Ride it. And only it. There are . . . others about who have long memories.”

In his ear,
Mata Hari
commented on the overheard conversation between Eliana and Petros. “Matt, would you like a Defense Remote for backup?”

“Nod,” he said. “Just stay on-line and monitor. I detect nothing that Suit can’t handle.”

“All right,” Mata Hari
sniffed. “But it’s harder to repair you organics than to debug a new program.”

Matt smiled. She was so protective of him. “I’ll be okay. Just monitor us from Suit’s uplink feed.”

“As you wish.”

He followed Eliana through the swiftly opening lock-door and up to the tubeway loading platform. A maglev taxi whistled to a stop in front of them, its yellow sausage tube free-floating beside the platform. He motioned for Eliana to wait and let him enter first. She fidgeted, her impatience poorly concealed.

Moving within Suit, Matt felt expanded, enlarged, empowered.

Hello, Suit. Sorry to be away so long
.

Suit hugged him back the way a puppy might nuzzle its young master.

Time to work now, but at cyborg machine speeds. The speed he called
ocean-time
. With a thought, Matt changed his perception speed.

Forty milliseconds
passed, according to Suit’s mind whisper.

Faceplate’s Eyes-Up display went Active. In the right quadrant scrolled a mech readout on the taxi and the transport platform. Long data columns listed taxi propulsion mode, vehicle registration data, its fabrication date, the equipment suppliers and subcontractors, the energy ambience for this Transport station, power fluxes lying behind the tubeway’s metal walls, the linear induction magfields that supported the taxi and propelled it along the station’s looping tubeways, and scores of other parameters.

On the left quadrant glowed a downlink from
Mata Hari
that showed the local space environment, the status of the six other starships docked at Zeus Station, the slightly varying distance—now at 30,431 kilometers—to Halcyon’s surface, ground-to-space shuttle launches from the planet’s human colony of Olympus, the ebb and flow of the planet’s meteorological cycles, its electronic noise emissions, and thousands of other data details. Most datafeeds were through-putted to his on-line nanoware subsystems and stored away in his cerebral nanocubes—for later recovery as needed. Finally, in the middle of the faceplate there floated a virtual-reality graphic of the tube taxi, already sectioned along its long axis and rotating in three dimensions.

Two hundred sixty milliseconds
.

“Matt. When are—”

Nine hundred milliseconds
.

Chemical sniffers and neutron activation sensors showed the taxi clean of any explosives or offensive weapons. Inside the taxi, Suit’s scanners likewise showed no gaseous incapacitation systems. It contained only a forward bench and a rear bench, facing each other, with side wall entry hatch in between. It also contained maglev machinery, a simple Go-Fetch control console, and the standard eco-comforts—all apparently safe. Suit stepped inside, taking the rear benchseat.

One and a half seconds
.

“—you going to enter? Oh.”

One and three quarter seconds
had passed since
ocean-time
.

“Step-down,” he mentally ordered Suit.

His senses slowed now, much the way one feels a slow turn around a roadway corner in an old-style surface conveyance. Centripetal force seemed so endless in such things. Matt blinked, clearing his faceplate for politeness’ sake.

Eliana sat down opposite him on the front benchseat, long legs pulled up underneath her. Her eyes shied away from him, focusing on a mid-air advertising holo. The hatch shut and the taxi jerked forward.

Time to find out how provincial she really was. And time to ask some direct questions. “Eliana, why are you so secretive with me? You’re the Patron, I’m the Vigilante. If I’m to do good work for you and your brother, you should be more confiding.”

She faced him, her look guilty. “I know. You’re right. But . . . secrecy is a way of life among the Halcyon Greeks. All we can count on are those of our Clan, and even family may use you, may make you a tool for their purposes.” She looked down at her lap, where she’d interlaced her fingers. “I . . . I thought my task was just to find a Vigilante and bring you here. But in being away from home, apart from the Derindl and my Clan, I’ve learned how uncontrolled life really is.” She looked up, her face a flood of mixed emotions. “I miss my Derindl Nest-mates. I miss the Mother Tree. And yet, I’m finding it hard to think of leaving your company.” She smiled awkwardly. “There, I’ve shared one of my secrets.”

Matt winced as her comment re-awoke vain wishes. This probing of motivations cut both ways. Time to change vectors. “Eliana, what did you want to be when you grew up? Before you chose to be a scientist?”

She looked surprised, then shy. “I . . . I wanted to be a teacher. Like my teachers at the Kostes Palamas school. It’s a school for crossbreeds, in Olympus. I spent half my early years there, half with my Nest-mates at Mother Tree Corinne. “

“Why a teacher?”

She bent her head. “Because they liked me.”

“And your Greek Clan neighbors? They didn’t like you?”

“They were Pure Breed human,” she said flatly, eyes rising and fixing again on him. Aware once more of how he led her. “There was always a distance in how they treated me. A certain wariness.”

“Like the Pericles group?”

She half-smiled, as if she relished his testing of her. “Not like them. Like normal people who fear what is different from them. Blood ties help. But they didn’t make me the
same
as them.”

“And the pure Derindl?”

Eliana shrugged, averted her eyes a moment as the tube taxi whooshed through a curve, then fixed back on him. “They were kind to me. They let me roam across the many trunks of the Mother Tree, between school sessions.” Her look became intent. “And you, Vigilante. Why did you choose to become a cyborg?”

Good. A counterstroke, even if the move was rather obvious
. “Lots of reasons.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

She looked confused, then irritated. “Hey. That’s not fair.”

“Right.”

Stiffness covered her face. “You enjoy teasing me, showing me that I’m oh so provincial. Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

Her disbelief shouted through Suit’s armor. She eyed him sharply. “I think you’re afraid to admit how inhuman you’ve become.”

Ummm. Not bad. A bit tough, even. He swallowed. “That’s irrelevant.”

She slapped the benchseat. “That’s not fair!”

“Exactly.”

Keen intelligence shone through her anger. “Explain, please.”

Once more, he admired her ability to put aside her local bias against cyborgs and engage with him. “Patron Themistocles, life is not only uncontrollable, it is not fair. You should not expect fairness in this life. Especially not from strangers.”

She looked closely at him now, a bit too close. And not with pity but with empathy. “Matt, who hurt you so bad?”

“None of your business!”

Eliana flinched as Suit’s external
speaker vibed her bones. Then she smiled daringly. “Still think I’m provincial?”

Humph
. Though Matt carried a library of knowledge in his forebrain, thanks to cyborg modifications, he’d always taken every chance to learn directly from life. And his self-taught tactics told him that when confronted by a smart student, try a diversion. “Who is Grandfather Petros?”

She blinked, startled by his change of topic. “My grandfather, of course.”

Behind his faceplate, Matt shook his head. “I mean, who is he socially? Politically? Culturally?”

Eliana shrugged. “Oh, he’s just my Nest-mate Sponsor.”

“What’s a Sponsor?”

She sighed, as if exasperated. “You need a Sponsor to join any Derindl Nest. It’s like a marriage arranger, but applies most of all to crossbreeds who choose to live among the Derindl.”

“Don’t you like humans?”

“Of course I do!” Her eyes flashed as that Greek temper of hers flared up. “My mother was a Pure Breed human. As is Grandfather Petros. As was my Grandmother Miletus. I just prefer the company of Derindl. They’re  . . . more even-tempered than most humans.” Something blinked on Suit’s chest-pack and reminded her of his cyborg nature. She looked away, her expression uneasy.