Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series)

by T. Jackson King

  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.

  Optical neurolinking. It meant that Matt felt the ship as if it were a suit of clothes. And the ship felt him as if he were . . . what?

  As a human-cyborg hybrid, he was used to vid-images displayed against his contact lenses. Used to his body’s autonomic linkage with onboard nanoware CPUs. He’d even gotten used to the knowledge-augmentation databyte nanocubes that rested in his brain’s neocortex—they gave him See-Identify education in strange phenomena. But this optical neurolinking was different. Even after seven years, he was still adjusting to it.

  As for Eliana, sitting nearby in a cocooning accel-couch . . . .

  Matt tried to forget the look of repulsion on her face when he’d first entered the Pit, putting it down to a provincial upbringing on a Third Wave colony. These days everyone talked to computers, many of them self-aware entities. They were part of the warp and weave of all human existence, whether planet-bound or starship-carried. What was the big deal? So he had a few built-ins not listed on your local Market Board? So what if it looked like he got it on with his starship, taking direct neuronal pleasure feeds? He didn’t . . . usually. But prejudice always flies faster than the facts. Or just strange realities.

  The back of his neck twinged. Mata Hari was reminding him it was time to get under way and leave Hagonar. With a sigh, Matt reached back, grabbed the multi-pin coax cable, and plugged it into the receptor implanted in the back of his neck. At cervical vertebrae one level.

  Ship could have plugged in using a servo. But for him to take the cable and plug in, using his own muscle power . . . well, symbolism wasn’t limited to organic lifeforms.

  Matt focused, accepting electronic and lightspeed photonic input.

  The dam burst as once more he entered ocean-time. Oceans filled him, oceans of machine-fed data filled his mind’s-eye.

  The silvery tube of the ship’s flexhull shivered in space, its shapechanging ability a thing unknown to human or Anarchate shipbuilders. His back itched as directed energy weapon domes popped out onto the hull. His biceps fed power to the ship’s two antimatter cannons, which lay alongside the main hull like pontoons on an outrigger sailboat. He clenched tight his jaw muscles, bringing on-line the deuterium-lithium six fusion drive for system departure. Ears listened to tachyonic comlinks, synthetic aperture and phased array radars. His eyes “saw” infrared, ultraviolet, gamma ray, and radioactives, painting for him a non-human picture of Riemannian space. Matt sniffed. Nose smelled through subtle sensors, devices that could detect biological spores drifting through space upon ancient stellar winds. Inside his chest, his heart beat. Oh, how it beat! It beat in sync with the Alcubierre Drive that could move him and Mata Hari from one star to another in days, once they moved away from the local system’s planets.

  Matt’s hands trembled against their pads. Airlocks, servos, and backup fusion power plants scattered all over Mata Hari cycled on-line. As for his fingers . . . each fingertip linked one-to-one with the ten major weapons systems of Mata Hari. He controlled the life or death of a planet with barely a touch. As for feet . . . they usually get you from one place to another. Not his. They felt the artificial gravity loads throughout the thousand and one rooms of a two kilometer-long starship. And last, but not least, was his groin. He grinned, guessing what Eliana might think. In truth, his groin analogued to the ship’s autonomic defense systems, the systems controlling overload power, the systems that in the end would mean the difference between survival and death.

  And directing the cone instrumentalities were his eyelids—when he blinked. Blink-control keyed in the electro-optical sensors, as with his suit’s Eyes-Up display. But eyelids worked at a slow macro level, when milliseconds didn’t matter. On a finer-scale, his brain wave patterns ordered everything—through PET. Mata Hari used a positron emission tomography unit, with subcutaneous SQUIDs embedded in his scalp, to let him communicate directly with Mata Hari ’s own gallium-arsenide, chip-based mind. Matt’s mind-images moved only at the speed of electrochemical stimulation of nerve fibers—at least until they got past the coax connector. Then the cable’s optical fibers offered true lightspeed communion with something unknown to most humans. Yet feared by many, like Eliana.

  Instinct allied to emotion allied to analytical thought. Matt was a true cyborg . . . and it was time to go to work.

  “Ready for ignition?” he queried mentally, a secondary thought switching on the forward holosphere for Eliana’s benefit.

  “Ready for system departure,” Mata Hari said, using again her warm, feminine voice.

  “Depart,” he vocalized, clenching his jaw. Two kilometers from the Bridge, deut-li fusion thrusters backed them away from Hagonar Station. Why had she spoken to him? Mata Hari could easily feed ship status directly to his mind over the PET relay. Why were some AIs as emotional as organics?

  “Understood,” Mata Hari said loudly. “Do you wish traffic clearance and summary?”

  “Affirmed,” he said firmly. He could play this game. Whatever it was. “Report on local traffic.”

  “Reporting. Of the dozen nearby starships, all but two remain docked at Hagonar Station,” Mata Hari said, her voice a windchime that caressed like a breeze. “Four new starships are approaching across system, from the direction of the B9 main sequence star. Distance—about 140 AU. Nearby, two ships share our outsystem vector. One of them is an Agonon-Thet starliner. The other is a freighter sponsored by Mu Pegasi that is approaching us from the rear.”

  “I see it.” The NavTactical icons flashed in the holosphere, a purple, red and green tracery of vectors, dots and shapes representing ships and gravity fields, all washed by blue waves. The waves represented the shifting electromagnetic and gravitomagnetic fields of a double-star system, where seven planets orbited the nearby G0 yellow star. He also saw Eliana, though she sat to his rear—thanks to an Interlock Pit filled with display screens that showed every part of the Spine hallway and the rooms lying along it. He saw everything . . . except for the Restricted Rooms in Mata Hari ’s deep interior, he thought sourly, rooms that were barred to him. Those parts were “hostile to organic lifeforms”—or so Mata Hari stubbornly insisted. Were they really? Every time he’d asked, she’d dodged the question, her tone sounding embarrassed.

  “Is the vector for Sigma Puppis laid in?” Matt asked, glad for the pretense he controlled anything aboard a self-aware Dreadnaught-class starship.

  “Of course,” Mata Hari said, her voice inflection descending. “Your guest . . . is she attractive to you?”

  God. What a thing to say out loud. “None of your business, Mata Hari.”

  A Pit screen showed Eliana, fashionably dressed in a blue jumpsuit and partially cocooned by the clamshells of the accel-couch. She seemed preoccupied with staring at a sidewall display of the local star systems lying within a four hundred li
ght year cube. Their target—Sigma Puppis—pulsed brightly on it, a double star beacon 194 light years from Sol.

  “Why is it none of my business?” asked Mata Hari.

  Eliana smiled wanly, not looking his way.

  He swore mentally. “Do you understand the concept of privacy?”

  Pause. “Oh. You mean that organic temporal displacement habit of pretending one entity is actually alone in a universe filled with pulsating and penetrative energy fields?”

  “The very same.”

  “Understood.” A longer pause. “But why pretend to unreality?”

  Matt sighed. “Mata Hari, you are familiar with the AI self-check routine called System Check-out. Right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Humans do it too. So do aliens. We need to separate from reality, now and then. By sleep. By intense thought. Or by privacy.”

  “So?”

  “So shut up and give me some privacy!”

  Eliana muffled a laugh.

  Mata Hari shut up. Only the whisper of circulating air currents disturbed his concentration as Matt monitored their outsystem departure. He had little to do. But human instincts, allied to computer senses, often yielded a hybrid mix that worked well. At least for symbionts like him and Mata Hari.

  The Agonon-Thet starliner drew away from them. The freighter behind them came within ten thousand klicks of their position, somewhat higher above the ecliptic plane than Mata Hari. He and the ship moved out on the deut-li fusion drive, slowly working up to one-half lightspeed, reaching for the heliopause. It was a boring wait, but necessary. It wasn’t considerate to activate the Alcubierre Drive this close to a double-star system—gravity wave perturbations could disturb planetary orbits. And the miniature universe created by an Alcubierre Drive usually had Rules that conflicted with Riemannian space. So most of the time you waited until you were past the heliopause, a matter of several hours transit time. Mata Hari ’s deut-li thrusters bellowed far behind, tickling his feet as they pushed thermonuclear implosion products out past magfield throats.

  “THREAT! THREAT! THREAT!” keened Mata Hari in a loud voice.

  Eliana looked over with alarm. “Where?”

  Images filled his mind as the AI flooded him with inputs, pushing him back into ocean-time and speeding up his slow human reflexes.

  Laser beams reached out and touched Mata Hari ’s flexmetal hull, coming from one of the ships lying behind them that was docked at Hagonar.

  Matt’s left shoulder burned to the touch of coherent flame. The pain of a thousand ant bites scored him.

  He shrugged.

  Mata Hari rotated and emitted gaseous mercury, diffusing the laser beams even as they refocused. Adaptive optics mirrors seeded into every inch of Mata Hari ’s flexible hull warped the ship’s skin into a convex bulge, breaking up and reflecting back all coherent energy beams that got through the gas cloud.

  Fingers tapped.

  Within a heartbeat, free electron laser beams reached back to the aggressor, impacting its power plant. Primal energies erupted, staggering Trade Station Hagonar in its languid orbit about the star Hyperion. Within that heartbeat, Mata Hari vibrated once, twice, three times. Defense torpedoes streaked toward the station. The torps carried white noise generators, holo decoys, Seek/Identify sensors, and Nanoshells that would envelop the expanding cloud of debris, sample it, taste it, and report back to Mata Hari —by faster than lightspeed tachyonic senses—the identity of their now-dead opponent.

  It all left Matt wondering at the attack. Who would be stupid enough to attack a Dreadnought-class battleship? And an alien one at that? As he sighed, his mind said “Thanks” to Mata Hari and he chose to leave ocean-time.

  Sitting in the Pit with his chin just above the deckplates, Matt turned and looked back at Eliana, who now stared at the purple-glowing debris cloud on the sidewall screen. She seemed a young woman trying to do her best on a deadly stage larger than her planet or her fears. Someone smart and brave but uncertain of how to move in the deadly game of Anarchate survival.

  “Who hates you, Eliana?”

  She turned away from the screen and faced him, her look immensely sad. “What? What did you say?”

  “Who hates you enough to hire an armed freighter as a backup to a Level Three Enforcer?”

  “Hates me?” Eliana said nervously. “Uh, Halicene Conglomerate?”

  “Possibly.” There was something unusual about this woman of quick mood changes, something she hid. “But unlikely. The Enforcer was likely a throwaway assassin. Nice if it worked, no big deal if it didn’t. That attacking ship—” in his mind a datastream from Mata Hari ’s torps caressed Matt’s forebrain, excited several neuron clusters, and died out “—the ship that attacked us was a Second Wave human charter, on Trade lease to the aliens of the Pegasus Cluster. According to the remnants of its central Core memory. Why are humans after you?”

  Muscles jumped in her jaw. “I don’t know.”

  Chitin-mange! “Try again.”

  She blinked, then turned distant. “Are you accusing me of lying?”

  “Yes.”

  A pink flush spread across her albino white face. As the pulse beat in her slim neck, Matt felt the looming bulk of Mata Hari ’s own entity-mind overshadowing his awareness. Much like a cloud might shadow a flying hawk. Able to enfold it fully, but standing apart from something quite different from itself. Mata Hari, he could tell, was also curious. Her Mata Hari persona image lifted a black eyebrow, adding her skepticism to his.

  “No!” Eliana said tersely. “I don’t lie!” Her green eyes flashed with defiance, but also with fear, as if he might discover what she was hiding.

  Matt changed his data-query approach. “All right, you don’t lie. But perhaps you’re not recalling something you already know, something hidden deep inside? A memory?”

  Eliana winced and looked away. “I have many memories I would rather not recall,” she said, her voice pained.

  “Take your pick.”

  “Pericles?” she whispered tentatively, raising a hand to her lips.

  Ahhh. “And who is Pericles?”

  Eliana frowned thoughtfully. “Was. Actually, more of an organization. Named after an ancient Greek statesman. It is also the name of a Pure Blood human of Sigma Puppis who led the original Third Wave colonists to our new home.” She reached up to twist a few strands of jet-black hair, still avoiding his eyes. “They opposed the Union with the Derindl. But it was our only hope for survival as a colony. They . . . they hated crossbreeds like me. I thought them long dead.”

  “Perhaps they are. Why does this attack suggest them to you?”

  “Who knows!” Irritation filled Eliana’s voice. She slapped at the accel-couch rim. “You insisted I dwell in the Chaos of memories! It . . . it’s just that the Triune of Pericles prophesied that ‘no good would come of lying abed with aliens’—as he put it.” She focused again on the screen showing Hagonar and local space, now empty of the debris cloud.

  “Interesting,” Matt said, then recalled recent human history.

  Eliana’s home, Sigma Puppis, had been one of the first Union colonies—places where, mercifully, the native aliens were near one-to-one cousins of humans, and the yellow light of the G5 star suited humans. The Derindl came both male and female, they were mammalian to a remarkable degree, and aside from a bit too much copper in their hemoglobin-based blood, they resembled humans to within ninety percent of similarity. Still, any mating between such differently evolved species would always be sterile—unless the genomes of each species were modified to work together and produce zygotes that held the best potentials of both species. Unfortunately, the crossbreeds always needed artificial wombs to protect the mothers from immune-response reactions to the zygote’s strange blood chemistry. And when they reached maturity, they found themselves Strangers—belonging neither to the pure-strain humans nor the pure-strain Derindl. Such persons were loved by their parents, but they had a long way to go in achieving societal acceptanc
e. Especially in a rigid caste society like that of the tree-dwelling Derindl.

  “Eliana, has it been hard for you—growing up half-Human, half-Derindl?”

  She looked his way, her expression stark and pained. “No harder than being a cyborg, I suppose.”

  “Touché.” A direct hit from her sharp mind. But what lay underneath her tough-woman act, her defensiveness? “Patron, if you keep acting distant and aloof, you will get us both killed.”

  “I will not!”

  Her reply sounded weak even to his ears. “Patron, we were just attacked, for the second time. I have questions that need answering if I am to protect you.” She kept her gaze averted, her shoulders stiff as she sat in the accel-couch, as if she’d often endured verbal interrogation that hurt more than physical abuse. Well, there are other ways to appeal to someone as smart as Eliana. “Patron, why you?”

  “Why me what?” She said, turning to him with open confusion. “I don’t understand your question.”

  Outside, Matt’s ship moved through local space. Inside, on the Bridge, he word-danced with a neophyte to genocide, to wholesale slavery, to the Anarchate—where lives were toys easily discarded. “Eliana, why were you picked to find and hire a Vigilante? Why not your colony chief? Why not—”

  “Ioannis could trust only me!” she said defiantly.

  “And he is?”

  “My half-brother. Eldest of two.” With lips compressed, she eyed him the way a mongoose eyes a snake, aware now of how he fenced with her.

  “What does this Ioannis do?”

  “He is Despot of the colony,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Matt nodded agreeably. “He has no other reliable agents?”

  She smiled faintly, as if amused by their word-dance. “He has several. They’re all in use down-planet or in the system. Look, I’m your Patron. You’re my Vigilante. This will all be explained to you by Ioannis once we arrive in-system. All right?”

  “Sure,” Matt said mildly. “Uh, do you like mysteries?”