Vigilante Series 2: Nebula Vigilante (11 page)

Matt, Eliana and Mata Hari had walked nearly a kilometer to arrive just outside the red-striped pressure door to the Bridge. It opened at their approach, an automatic courtesy that Mata Hari had long ago arranged thanks to a few organic sensors now embedded in entrance portals in the human-friendly parts of the ship. Matt began to follow Eliana in when Mata Hari called to him.

“Matt, could you and I have a private talk? Here, perhaps?

He eyed the slim figure of the feminine AI who had rescued him seven years ago, who sometimes appeared as the Barbarian Queen, and who had, during the takeover of the ship by BattleMind, called to him to rescue her from the Memory Pillars
on the Bridge. Her look was very human and very . . . tense, he thought.

“Sure, Mata Hari. Eliana, I’ll join you in a few minutes. OK?”

His lifepartner looked surprised, then puzzled. Puzzlement also filled him. “Sure, Matthew. I’ll work with Leader Sarah on checking the food supplies to be sure we have enough for this crowd for the trip to the Keyhole Nebula.”

“Perfect,” he said as Eliana finished entering the Bridge. The pressure door slid closed behind her coiling tail. He turned to Mata Hari. “Yes?”

The AI fingered her white pearl choker necklace, then put both arms behind her, as if standing at formal attention. The black eyes of the World War I female spy persona fixed on him.

“Are we still partners?” Mata Hari said in a husky voice.

What the? “Of course we are, Mata Hari. Just like always.”

She shook her head, the black spiral curl of hair holding its shape when in a normal woman some strands would have come loose. “Not like always. Now, you have Eliana. An organic person like you. You . . . you talk to her the way . . . the way you used to talk to me.”

Matt blinked. This AI was more than a newly born self-awareness. She had been created by BattleMind to be the organic interface that the dragon AI could never match. She had spent time with other people, aliens mostly, before picking up his lifepod. As best he could tell, the T’Chak starship had only entered the Milky Way, or reawakened after a long AI stasis mode, just a year before she rescued him. And she had treated Matt like . . . a real person, like someone she trusted, like someone . . . who understood Mata Hari’s inner self. Ahhhhh . . .

“Mata Hari, I have come to love Eliana.” The black eyes did not blink. “She . . . she is the companion I never knew in my years of working various jobs in the Anarchate system. During those years I had . . . seen human couples and wondered about how they related. I even recalled . . .” he blinked away the tears “recalled how my mother Kristin and my dad Andre often held each other during the winter windstorms. How they looked at my
oldest sister Charlotte just after she was born. But until I met Helen I never thought of that being possible for me. Then Helen was taken away from me. Now Eliana has shown me that finding love . . . is possible again.” He paused, noticing again the intenseness of Mata Hari’s gaze. “But you have lived in my mind for seven years. You know my feelings. You know my thoughts. You know my reactions when I see other people being hurt. You know . . . you know what I have told no one. That I wish to have been at home when the slavers hit, so at least I could know that I fought the beings who kidnapped my family and treated them as breeding stock for cloneslave humans. Right?”

Mata Hari unlocked her arms, then
reached out to him with one holo hand. A hand that felt . . . whispy solid. He gasped. “Matthew, I have learned how to use miniature tractor beams to give my holo image some degree of substance. In time, I could become more . . . substantial. Almost like Eliana. Would you like that?”

Matt reached up and touched his fingers to hers. “Mata Hari, yes we are still partners. Our inner selves still link to each other. And . . . your feelings for me make me feel conflicted, yet also joyful. Now, with you emerging this way, sharing the physical side of your inner self, I feel even closer to you. Thank you.”

Mata Hari smiled palely. Her black eyes blinked, with perhaps the sparkle of a teardrop showing. “But we . . . can never make physical love the way I have seen you and Eliana do it. And she is a good woman, a good life . . . entity. She is good for you, Matthew. But so am I.”

He reached out to touch her left shoulder, feeling a kind of solidity there, even if the holo lacked the warmth normal to most organics. “Yes, you are good for me. I think that, seven years ago when I thought of the death of
Helen in front of my eyes, I might have gone crazy. But for the presence of you, and the real purpose that your Vigilante option has given me. Thank you, Mata Hari. Now, shall we join Eliana?”

His friend the AI blinked, then smiled a normal smile. “Yes, let us join her. Let us be three together. Three in caring. Three partners in life . . . now together.”

Matt stepped through the opening slidedoor, hoping that  no tears showed. After all, tears were an emotional weakness. Weren’t they?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Two weeks later, Matt sat in bed looking at a color holo of NGC 3324, or the Keyhole Nebula. It showed an enlargement of a reddish gas shell that was being pushed out by ultraviolet radiation from several O-type white stars. The rim area that the Anarchate molecular memory crystal said was the site of a naval shipyard lay near the gas bump commonly referred to as the “nose”. The Anarchate base lay just beyond the open space created by the UV radiation. He waved a hand to enlarge the border of the hollow gas cloud and spotted a green-colored oval that had two white stars near its inner boundary. Standing out as a small green splotch against the rust-red of the nebula, the data that scrolled along the bottom of the image said the shipyard orbited a white A-type star. The Anarchate ID for the star was CC41324 and it listed four planets with an asteroid belt intermediate between three and four. The shipyard was located on a Ceres-size asteroid. All four planets were gas globes still raw from their creation twenty million or so years ago. No life existed in the their ammonia and nitrogen atmospheres. To Matt, it seemed an ideal location. All lifeforms had to stay within either the starships being built, visiting for repairs, or within the several dome habitats on the shipyard rock ball.

“What is your plan of attack?” asked Mata Hari as she sat to Matt’s right, leaning against a fake wood headboard.
Her holo form made a slight indentation in the silken pillow.

He smiled, glad t
hat even though Eliana said she truly understood the need for Mata Hari’s feminine side to be “comforted” by Matt, it would not be pleasant for her to enter and see his nude self sitting beside a Barbarian Queen wearing only jewelry. Nope, not pleasant at all.

“
See the big asteroid where the shipyard habitats are located?”

Mata Hari nodded her head, in perfect imitation of a real woman. “Yes, I do. Also multiple
starships are orbiting it. So?”

He smiled. Mata Hari liked to pretend she was not the true repository of every bit of encrypted data about Anarchate
battleglobes, regional naval bases, shipyards and fuel depots that had lain within the molecular memory crystal he’d stolen. Between Mata Hari and Eliana’s algorithms, it had taken a half day to break the encryption code. They now reveled in hundreds of petabytes of highly secret Anarchate data that Combat Command now knew he possessed. Or rather, Mata Hari possessed it and was clearly aware of the data points he had been looking at as they came within a few hours of breakout from Translation.

“So . . .
you will notice that the orbit of the giant asteroid has swept clear the usual debris common to all asteroid belts. There are no boulders, or even small pebbles located near the shipyard rock ball. It looks like we could Translate to within a hundred kilometers of the shipyard,” Matt said.

Mata Hari
’s holo lips tightened. “Matthew, materializing within a matter-crowded area of space is dangerous. Aside from gravity wave shocks to nearby planets, it is a major reason why starships nearly always materialize
outside
the heliopause border of a star system.” She focused intently on him. “That way we avoid sharing space with even a few molecules of stellar wind emissions. Why take this chance?”

He double-tapped the rock ball image, causing the holo to shrink in scale, enough so that the open space between the belt and planet four was visible. “Well, we could arrive here, in open vacuum,” he mused. “But that would put us a long ways away from the base. They would feel our gravity wave instantly while it would take us long minutes to reach them, even traveling at three-fourths lightspeed. If there are operational
Nova-class battleglobes at the base, they would begin firing toward us as soon as their CPUs gave them the vector of our arrival. I prefer to strike simultaneously with our arrival.”

“Tactically, that makes sense,” Mata Hari said as
she fingered a gold-link necklace. “But the precursor Alcubierre Drive space-time globe that precedes our emergence can only displace molecules, not pebbles or anything solid. We could lose part of the ship if our arrival coincided with the location of solid matter. But you know that, of course. How recent is this holo image of the base rock ball?”

Matt smiled. She was indeed tracking his every stop and visit locale. “One month, according to the time stamp of the molecular memory crystal. Also, while the Anarchate ships do not materialize at the base, the crystal says it is common for them to arrive just outside the asteroid belt, near the fourth gas giant. That said, they arrive on a specific schedule. Any gravity wave pulse that does not match the scheduled arrival times is automatically seen as hostile and is fired on,” he said.

“Have you located the arrival schedule, Matthew?”

“Yes. As you likely know. It’s there,” he said, pointing to a data box lying below the text lines. “Matching our departure time with our travel time says we can arrive at the Trinary hour of Combat Command. To within a few seconds,” he added.

Mata Hari nodded her head, then slid off the bed to stand beside the platform. With a shake of her head she resumed her frilly white Victorian dress mode. “What is your decision, then?”

“We arrive just outside the belt at the appointed time unit, which puts us within five
light minutes travel time of the base,
if
we arrive at three-fourths lightspeed. But that means the base’s optical telescopes will see we are
not
a battleglobe or courier ship one minute before we arrive. Then again, our antimatter beams travel at lightspeed so the telescopic giveaway will be simultaneous with the arrival of our AM beams. We will keep firing lightspeed weapons as we come in, until we reach the range of our pressor, tractor and KKPs. Sound okay to you?”

His AI partner smiled normally. “Yes. This ship is my home and I prefer not
to risk its integrity. Or risk the lives of our organic guests. Or the life of Eliana.” She turned to walk out of his roomsuite via the slidedoor.

“Mata Hari, it’s great being partners with you.”

She paused in her stride, then headed for the open slidedoor. “Yes, Matthew, it is . . . great being partners. Thank you for understanding. And for Eliana’s acceptance of me.”

Matt smiled
as she exited, thinking of how much Eliana enjoyed the small children who’d come aboard. And the smart friendliness of Sarah Vasiliades. He wondered if Sarah and her fellow humans had reached a decision on where they should be let off. The choices of Anarchate planet, human colony planet or a new world suitable for a small colony gave them more choices than he had had in his early life. Eliana had left earlier saying she had genomic research work to carry out in Biolab on the slow virus that today was hitting him with the force of a transport lifter. His knuckles, finger joints, knees and elbows all hurt thanks to the effects of the rheumatoid arthritis that the virus had hit him with due to its activation of a few sequences in his Chromosome Six region.
Damn!
Enough self-pity. Getting up gingerly, Matt grabbed his
yukata
and headed for the Biolab. Perhaps they could both find Leader Sarah and deal with life issues before mass death occurred at his hands.

Sarah Vasiliades looked left as the slidedoor to the commissary opened and in walked Matthew Dragoneaux the Vigilante and Eliana Themistocles, the geneticist. She understood the two were coming to learn the group’s decision about where they wished to be lef
t off, after the Keyhole attack. With a stiffening of her back and a quick straightening of her blue jumpsuit, she smiled at them both, glad to see them but also very glad that the group of twenty Omega managers were standing behind and to either side of her. Two weeks spent with them, with Gatekeeper and with solo families and workers had melded them together, even as some members expressed strong views on where they should go. Red-headed Rebecca moved closer to stand beside her.

“Think they will object?” asked the former manager of Omega’s staff housing department.

“I doubt it,” Sarah murmured. “It’s a sensible choice and not that far away from Keyhole.”

The tall, curly black-haired form of the Vigilante stopped a meter from her crowd, his left hand holding the right hand of Eliana the geneticist.
His red-brown skin contrasted nicely with Eliana’s albino white. And she’d learned to be patient with Matt when she’d heard about his slow virus chronic disease problem. But both of them looked alert, rested and interested. She hoped their good mood would last through this visit.

Dragoneaux inclined his head. “Leader Sarah, we understand your group has reached consensus. Would you like to discuss your decision here, on the couch among the crowd over there, or in private?”

About seventy of her fellow bondServants were in the commissary eating, playing vidgames, chatting about the future or sharing worries about kids and jobs. They had noticed the Vigilante’s arrival but did not act interested in coming over. And their friendly AI Gatekeeper was keeping the young children busy with three dee holos of little furry critters. So be it. She smiled at Eliana and at . . . Matt. She should be polite and use his first name.

“Matt, we can visit here, with my fellow Omega managers,” she said, gesturing to various people. “You know Rebecca and George. Also gathered here are Knut, Suzanne, Aiko, Atsushi, Marybell, Thomas, Wasuko, Giuseppe, Chang, and other folks you have not yet met. We formed discussion groups and have reached a decision on the three choices offered by you.”

Eliana leaned forward, her green eyes alert and focused. “And? Where do you wish to be left off?”

“Kappa Crucis cluster,” Sarah said. “
The Jewel Box as it’s known. While all the primary stars are supergiants just fourteen million years old, a Sixth Wave human colony orbits a yellow-white F3 main sequence star that is hidden by the red-orange supergiant at the center of the vee of giant stars. It is called Morrigan by its settlers and has been settled for fifty years. While the settlers are all of Irish or Celtic heritage, and speak Gaelic among themselves, we think we can fit in there and be of help to the million or so settlers.”

Matt nodded slowly. “Your data match my information.
Morrigan is just 1,600 light years from the Keyhole, and lies between the Scutum-Crux and Carina-Sagittarius arms. We will be glad to drop you off on Morrigan. Along with fifty thousand platinum Standards as our effort to contribute to your settlement efforts.”

“Nice,” said George
, his brogue reminding Sarah of his own Irish heritage. “We can buy new clothes, datapads, toys for the kids and furnishings for wherever we can find living space. Most of the families here have worried a lot about the colony setup we might find at Morrigan. This will make things . . . less troublesome.”

Suzanne smiled too. “Thank you, Matthew
Dragoneaux. And you too Eliana for your help with our families and kids. They’ve enjoyed their visits to the Biolab and your talks about what you do.”

Sarah had appreciated Eliana’s involvement in helping folks relax after the horrendous image of the T’Chak dragon. The woman had shared some of her family history, and the story of how Matt had saved her planet and its peoples from destruction by the Halicene Conglomerate. It was an impressive story. But being far away from such a famous human as . . . Matt would probably be smart for regular folks like themselves. She would rather
hear
about his exploits from the galactic tachnet than be onsite as starships and weapons fought and exploded.

“You are welcome, Suzanne,” Eliana said, glancing at a patient Matt, then showing the relaxed side of her that Sarah appreciated. “Some of your young children remind me of my niece Calyce. And her fellow crossbreed students. Makes me . . . be hopeful about the future.”

Sarah nodded, then focused on the Vigilante. “Matt, what now? What happens when we arrive at CC41324?”

His relaxed expression turned neutral. “Combat. We will conduct a hit-and-run strike on the naval shipyard that lies in its asteroid belt. We will approach at speed. We should be in and out within ten minutes. A few hours later we will Translate and head for Kappa Crucis.”

George stepped forward a pace. “Any chance some of us can watch this space combat? I’ve never seen an Anarchate military shipyard.”

Matt looked puzzled, then shrugged his broad shoul
ders under the checkered
yukata
he wore. “As you wish. Anyone who wants to watch in . . . human time-mode can call for Channel Seven and the wallscreen will shift to that channel.”

“Human time-mode?” asked blond-haired Suzanne. The former IT manager for the entire casino sounded puzzled.
And, Sarah noticed, she was holding hands with George. A nice development, she thought.

Eliana looked up at Matt, who kept his expression neutral. “Suzanne, Sarah,
George, Rebecca, everyone, I am a human-cyborg hybrid,” he said. “Some of you have seen the cable patch at the back of my neck. Or noticed my strength when I helped move one of those portable couches over there. What no one has seen is when I am in lightspeed synchrony, communicating with this starship, with Mata Hari and with BattleMind in what I call
ocean-time
. My mind moves at lightspeed then, and nanoseconds move like minutes while picoseconds whiz along. It is the only way a human can think at computer speed and interrelate with this starship. In short, I and
we
think fast, act fast, and any battle we are involved in happens very quickly.” He smiled briefly. “Time for me to head for the Bridge. We will be materializing not far from the shipyard asteroid very shortly. Good day, all.”