Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series)

by T. Jackson King

  “Sometimes.” Sudden guardedness now showed. “Why?”

  Matt gestured at the wallscreen. “Well, you might consider the mystery of why you were allowed to reach Hagonar Station, alive, and contact a Vigilante. The two attacks prove that one or several parties tracked you to Hagonar. Surely you realize that your brother has powerful enemies. Among the Halicene, at the very least.”

  Sharp dismay filled her face. Eliana sat back hard in the accel-couch. “Look, I’ve never done this before,” she said, her tone one of resignation. “I’ve never been off-planet or out-system. But I love my Nest-mates, both Derindl and Human. We need help, badly. We need an advocate. We need someone who can spar and perhaps fight with greedy aliens. So I can see why Vigilantes are expensive. What do you advise?”

  Matt admired her ability to be humble in addition to being smart. Yes, she was definitely teachable. “I advise rest, Patron. You just survived two attacks on your life. You’re aboard a strange ship with a strange man. And I doubt you got much sleep on the way out. Correct?”

  “Correct,” she said, letting her tiredness show. “Where do I rest?”

  “You may occupy the stateroom at the far end of the Spine hallway,” Matt said, nodding to the rear of the Bridge and the red slidedoor.

  “Thanks.” Behind him, Eliana’s accel-couch opened up like a clamshell. She stepped out, swayed a bit, then walked over to him. Eliana squatted down at the edge of the Interlock Pit and stared into the cone, appearing both curious and somewhat repelled by what she saw. “I’m . . . I’m sorry to be so sharp with you, Matt. In my family, I’m usually the one who is the most even-tempered, the peacemaker of the Clan.”

  Matt wondered at that but then recalled how uncertain he’d felt when first he’d gone into space, after the death of his family. “You mean for a Greek, you’re even-tempered,” he teased.

  Eliana chuckled, allowing herself a friendly smile. “Yeah, we Greeks do have a reputation for passionate argument. But I’m half Derindl and they’re pretty mellow, most of the time.”

  He wondered again about the native Derindl, a species his data files said were ecological engineers without peer, who lived in giant Mother Trees. Matt folded his hands in his lap and smiled back. “The Derindl . . . did you become a molecular geneticist in order to fit in better with their culture?”

  Eliana eyed him warily, then relaxed again. “Their culture? It’s mine too, remember.” She looked up at the forward holosphere and its NavTactical icons, then back to him, her expression now serious. “Actually, I’m a scientist by default and by choice. My half-brothers, like most Greek males, run the Trade side of the Clan’s business. If you’re unmarried, a woman and want your own choices, you do science.” The bitterness in her voice surprised Matt. “But I also studied hard to please my Grandfather Petros and Grandmother Miletus. They . . . they always had time for me.” She stood up abruptly. “Uh, how long before we go FTL?”

  Matt blinked, perceived a mind-image, and smiled amiably. “In three hours.” Should he let go the personal sharing and revert to employee mode? Eliana’s distracted gaze said yes. “Also, Mata Hari tells me no one else threatens us. The incoming freighter has veered away and will dock soon with the station. Hagonar Central Control is overcome with irritation at the mess we left on their doorstep.” She smiled at that. “The outgoing Agonon-Thet starliner is already angling down-ecliptic to set up for its own Alcubierre Drive Translation. And Mata Hari has finished its repairs from the recent conflict.”

  Eliana’s mood changed suddenly, her manner now dark and brooding. “Computers are like that. They think all things can be fixed with new hardware.”

  “Why not, Patron?” Mata Hari said in a soft contralto voice, addressing Eliana directly for the first time since she’d come onboard.

  Eliana looked badly startled, then glanced up at the ceiling. “Uh, because no matter what a doctor fixes, organics remember the pain!” she said with sharp certitude.

  Mata Hari laughed, her windchime voice echoing off the flexmetal walls of the Bridge. “I remember pain. I recently felt it.”

  “My experience is just the opposite,” Eliana said tensely. “And I’d rather not talk about it.” She turned away from Matt and walked past the crystalline pillar forest of Mata Hari ’s mind, aiming for the red slidedoor that led into the Spine hallway and its hundreds of private staterooms. Walking with shoulders stiff, back straight, and short tail flaring as it protruded from her blue jumpsuit, she seemed the embodiment of a Secret.

  Well, she was his Patron after all, and entitled to some privacy. But Matt couldn’t help wondering why she hated computers.

  As did Mata Hari, who now connected to him mind-to-mind. Once again she PET-imaged herself as a black-haired young woman wearing a white, floor length chiffon and lace dress with long sleeves and a low-cut bodice, with a large cameo at her throat. It was an image that befitted the historical Mata Hari ’s pre-war identity as the wife of a Dutch diplomat. That was before the real Mata Hari divorced the diplomat, worked in Asia as an exotic belly-dancer, then made her way to Europe and the employ of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial German forces. In Matt’s mind-image, his Mata Hari sat in a chair on the front porch of an old, Victorian-style house, fingers of one hand tapping the chair arm. “Matt, I think she’s going to be a problem.”

  “I hope not.” This Job was shaping up to be a real challenge. And after seven years spent roaming Anarchate space, dealing mostly with aliens, he was intrigued by a Challenge that involved his fellow humans. And Eliana didn’t know the half of his ship’s combat abilities, or his own. Perhaps both sides could learn from each other?

  Hours later, Matt awoke in the shadowed darkness of his own stateroom. He felt the touch of cool air currents, heard rasping air pumps and creaking metal flexwalls, enjoyed the blood-warm bed platform on which he lay, and felt a sense of ennui. Of dislocation. Of disorientation.

  They’d undergone Alcubierre Translation.

  The corollary of being able to create your own pocket universe within which the speed of light was hundreds of times faster than in normal Riemannian space, so you could travel quickly from star to star, is that the passage of time within the ship during the Translation can seem endless. It isn’t, but it feels that way. And something had touched him deep inside, touched that core being who had howled at the moon’s white disk over two million years ago, as the first humans scavenged on the Serengeti Plains of East Africa.

  Matt sat up.

  He did not need visible light to see his room.

  Nanoware vision upgrades imaged it all—his workstation table, the library wall shelves filled with optical disks, the entrance to his fresher unit, three Calder-style mobiles dangling from the ceiling, the acrylic paint easel to one side, his weaving loom with its half-done Hopi Corn Maiden pattern, even his clothes hanging behind an actual wood-slat door. And on the wall opposite his bed hung his collection of edged, projectile and energy hand-weapons, including a feather-tasseled White Mountain Apache spear from his own tribal heritage. Matt saw them all through infrared energy. Energy given off by his body, which reflected back to him from the talismans of his life.

  More images touched his eyes. Power sources studded the walls, floor and ceiling, their placement betrayed by ultraviolet sparks. A Navajo Ganado-style blanket hung on the wall like a dead black rectangle, soaking up infrared. Below it gleamed a small aquarium, filled with puffer-fish from the planetary sea of his last Job. The fish emitted their own infrared, but at a wavelength far below his own, and cold water is an efficient heatsink. Criss-crossing the room, like a 3D spiderweb, pulsed the coherent lightbeams of Mata Hari. Emitted by low power diode lasers, the lightbeams touched him from any direction and even followed him into the bathroom, the hot tub, or under the virtual reality helmet and chair resting in one corner of the room. With her optical neurolinking, Mata Hari would never leave him, never abandon him, and never give up on him.

  Some people might think of an insect caught in a spide
r’s web and pity the poor unknowing creature. Matt saw things differently. He saw himself expanded. He saw himself as the organic-inorganic Interface he really was. Neither solely machine, nor just a simple organic. And even without Mata Hari, without Suit, there remained his body—his deadly body. Filled with antiviral biounits that protected him from eyes to toes, a cardiovascular bioupgrade for a High Threat environment, an extra kidney that recycled his urine, nylon-wrapped muscles and titanium-plated bones that gave him the strength of ten Heracles, and possessing fingertip lasers powered by a fuel-cell welded to one hip bone, he was a true cyborg. As such, he was used to blink-thought control over his instrumentalities.

  Matt called up a vision of Alcubierre Space-Time in his mind’s-eye, then code-blinked. He wished to contemplate the endlessness of Chaos.

  Mata Hari projected a different image into his room. This holosphere showed the end of the Spine hallway and the palm-locked door leading to Eliana’s stateroom. In a blink he was inside her room, staring down from a ceiling point-of-view at the crossbreed woman as she slept on her bed platform. She lay naked atop the sheets. The sprawl of her limbs both hid and revealed, tempting him to linger.

  But he valued privacy and was not a voyeur. “Mata Hari—what the hell are you doing?”

  “Protecting you,” she said tensely, her voice coming from a side wall acoustic membrane.

  “From what?”

  “Watch.”

  With his room still dark, Matt watched, feeling impatient and irritated. “Well?”

  “Observe.” The wide-screen view of Eliana, lying face down, narrowed suddenly. It zoomed in to focus on her right ear.

  Eliana stirred, shifting her head to one side. Her delicate nose and finely sculptured cheekbones glowed with infrared warmth, framed by the cooler surface of synthsilk covering the bed platform. At one side of the holosphere scrolled green light datastreams, depicting in agonizing detail her carbon dioxide exhalations, her REM eye movements, double heartbeat systolic and diastolic pressures as revealed by a diode laser focused on her carotid artery, skin saltiness, moisture evapotranspiration from her skin, and scores of other biophysical details. On the holosphere’s other side scrolled red-light Threat assessments.

  “What is it?”

  “Watch!” insisted Mata Hari.

  From out of the dark depths of Eliana’s ear came something.

  Something sinister.

  About the size of a pea, it floated upward, then expanded rapidly to the size of an eyeball. Then it became a fist-sized globe that bobbled on the room’s air currents.

  Matt trembled. He’d allowed a bioweapon carrier on-board Mata Hari. “What the fuck is it?”

  “Scanning. Passively. Be patient,” Mata Hari said tartly.

  Patience! Matt stood up, able only to pace in front of the red and green glowing holosphere, his mind churning over Options for weapons, then discarding them, aware that such bioweapons often spored when under attack. A lot of good his weaponry wall would do him now.

  At least Mata Hari had had the good sense to scan passively the free-floating intruder. An active Doppler pulse or laser ranging beam could easily be the trigger needed to set off the bioweapon. What was its software programming?

  “Interesting,” Mata Hari murmured.

  On the holosphere, the fist-sized bioweapon globe drifted toward the locked slidedoor leading into the Spine hallway of the ship. Eliana’s stateroom lay a kilometer from him, with four dozen airtight lock-doors between him and her. Which were hopefully closing right now!

  Eliana’s locked door hissed open. The bioweapon globe floated out into the Spine hallway, paused, then headed up-ship. Toward him.

  “What’s interesting?”

  “The bioweapon,” Mata Hari said. “Passive x-ray fluorescence scanning, along with wavelength and quantum mechanical scanning, show it to be mainly an aerogel.”

  “An aerogel? What’s that?”

  “Some species call it frozen smoke,” Mata Hari said, her tone academic intense. “It is an ultra low-density skeleton constructed of tetramethoxysilane molecules which were originally a dense oil interspersed with water. Remove the liquid and you have a nearly transparent foam-gel whose lowest density can approach 3 milligrams per cubic centimeter. Your air weighs only 1.2 milligrams per cubic centimeter. That is why it floats on an air current in the eight-tenths Earth gee we maintain aboard ship.”

  Matt scowled. “Gels don’t make doors cycle open. What did?”

  “Checking,” Mata Hari said hurriedly. “At the center of the aerogel is a small dense structure composed of chitin protein, polysaccharides, polyglycolic acids, the protein cytochrome-C, several rare earths, a mitochondria-sized power source, and several viral and plasmid chains in a cell-like container.” She paused. “The slidedoor’s electrolock was opened by a complex series of electron-shell wavelength shifts issuing from within the cell container.”

  Dimly, Matt remembered that the protein cytochrome-C aided in electron transport during respiration and photosynthesis—in biological systems. “Is the power source oxidation, chemosynthesis, or photosynthesis?”

  “Ultraviolet photosynthesis,” Mata Hari said tersely. “Watch closely.”

  In the holosphere the aerogel globe enlarged to fill the yard-wide space, then expanded beyond as Mata Hari focused on its core nodule. The ship began passive scanning of that inner structure, relying upon quantum wavelength electron shell shifts to illuminate the structure’s interior. A dim image built up in the holosphere, one of winding coils. It was a retrovirus programmed to seek out, infect, and destroy a very specific type of lifeform. Him. Or, at least a male human since Eliana lay unharmed.

  “Options?”

  Mata Hari held silent an unusually long time.

  “Well?”

  She laughed softly. “Patience is a virtue in both organic and inorganic lifesystems.”

  Matt relaxed. She wouldn’t joke if she hadn’t found a solution. Optoelectronic memory systems that thought at the speed of light were nice. Even if he sometimes felt like a poorly endowed relative, with only native instinct to offer up to their partnership. “Options?”

  “Aerogels don’t dilute laser light or other coherent energy forms.”

  “You mean we can simply blast it?”

  “Maybe.” She paused again. “But that’s too simple an answer. Why is it here? Why does she carry it?”

  The Anarchate held answers for every horror. “Some local Anarchate despot is tired of humans and wants to test out a self-replicating viral plague before going after the rest of us?”

  “Perhaps.” Mata Hari’s voice echoed off his stateroom walls. “But why a Singleton like her? Why not a whole colony? The Anarchate is, if anything, relentlessly efficient. It would not waste something this unique on a single being.”

  Matt watched on a sidewall screen as the aerogel headed relentlessly his way, opening and closing the hallway lock-doors as it came to each one. It was now just three hundred meters away from his stateroom.

  “Maybe it’s not an Anarchate bioweapon,” he said. “Lots of species can bioengineer this well. Including humans. This could be the answer for why she was allowed to reach me.”

  “Perhaps,” Mata Hari said. “But is this the product of her brother Ioannis, the group Pericles, or some other stupid organic? You know, Matt, you humans have a tendency to make terribly destructive mistakes even when you get a second chance.”

  He fumed. “Tell me something I don’t already know. What do you recommend for a destruction option?”

  Time trickled away. On the wallscreen, the aerogel virus globe now lay just two hundred meters distant. In front of him, in the holosphere, its viral coil glowed redly.

  Mata Hari stirred in his mind, but spoke aloud. “Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly. “I’m sure a laser will burn it to a cinder before it can spore.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” An old, old memory welled up inside his hindbrain. A memory of something he’d learned as a clon
eslave decanter in the Flesh Markets of Alkalurops many, many years ago. “Mata Hari, do you have the capability to emit refrigerated carbon dioxide into the Spine hallway?”

  “Not normally.” Pause. “I can reroute some biorecycling tubes.”

  “Do it. Quickly!”

  “Target point?”

  “Try for Lock-Door Fourteen,” Matt said. “That’s six more minutes at the float rate of this aerogel.”

  “Complying.”

  He felt hungry. Blood hungry. He felt this way anytime someone, or something, sought his life. Matt didn’t care whether the bioweapon retrovirus was programmed to kill him, or simply co-opt his higher thought processes and make him into a Trojan golem. A golem who would then seek out other humans and infect them, a living, moving, breathing plague bacillus on a giant scale. No, he cared only that someone sought to kill him, to still the beating of his heart, to end the memories of a hard life among the stars. In the iridescent darkness of his stateroom, Matt turned and stared into the watery blue depths of his aquarium, remembering past Hunts. He trembled, all too eager to kill.

  “Ready,” Mata Hari said anxiously. “Will you share your thought processes on this Option?”

  “Yes. Search under Fires. And Snakes. It’s dual-encoded in my memories.”

  “Accessing.”

  Long ago, on a starship of the Third Wave, a human starship that still retained many old redundant safety systems—in the human pattern—he’d come across a pressurized cylinder stuck away in a long-abandoned storeroom. Later, after enduring a neurowhip lashing from his alien stevedore boss, who let him know unequivocally that curiosity in indentured servants was not welcome, he’d learned the cylinder’s purpose.

  It was a fire extinguisher.

  Not the ancient Halon system. Nor the more modern local-vacuum systems. No, this system relied on the expulsion of freezing cold carbon dioxide under several atmospheres of pressure, directed at the fire source—or a warm-blooded pest lifeform. Either method replaced the oxygen needed for combustion with carbon dioxide. Or instantly froze the warm organic shell of shipboard pests. Like rats. Or snakes. He smiled at the puffer-fish.