Matt reached out to comfort her. He patted Eliana on her shoulder. But he held back from hugging. If he hugged her, this would become more than just a Job. And he didn’t know if he could handle that right now. He cleared his throat. “Thank you, Patron. I’m very, very sorry for your loss. And my insensitivity.”
She rubbed her eyes and did not move away from his gauntleted hand. “When do we leave for the Autarch’s office Trunk?”
“Now.” Matt left on Suit’s external speaker for Eliana’s benefit. “Patron, take my hand. Please.” She did as instructed, moving closer gingerly, her gaze still downcast. “Mata Hari —encapsulate, pouch us out of ship’s skin, and eject us on a bearing for the Autarch’s office.”
“Eject us? That’s—”
Eliana’s words died away as the Bridge ceiling flexed down, encapsulated them, pouched them out, and then ejected them like a seed from a stomped grape. In less than a second he and Eliana were in freefall, rushing down to Mother Tree Melisen. Down. Green arms reached up for them. Blue sky watched over them. Seconds later, they reached terminal velocity for an object falling in Halcyon’s gravity well.
Beside him, the wind lifted Eliana’s hair straight up. She opened her mouth to scream. That sufficed for atmospheric pressure changes in her ears as they fell like two rocks. Hand in hand, they fell ever closer to the tree tops. Had she ever done freefall skydiving? No. Suit’s readouts showed her double hearts beating in sync, at a high pressure reading. She was scared . . . and not about to show it. Instead, Eliana closed her mouth, turned away from the approaching ground and fixed on his eyes. His human eyes. She spoke loudly, to be heard over the wail of rushing air.
“Matt—we need to go by the Port first! Have to make the Genetic Donation for you. Have to!”
“Why?” he boomed over Suit’s external speaker. “Doesn’t the Autarch have similar facilities at her Trunk?”
“Probably.” Squinting her eyes against the rushing wind, she looked around worriedly.
“Then we go straight to our meeting. The Tree certainly recognizes you.”
Silence greeted his answer. Telling Suit to extrude a slipstream shield for Eliana’s head to protect her face and eyes, Matt turned away and looked down, seeing a verdant green landscape.
Top Canopy rushed up, filling his horizon, a horizon notable only for a dormant volcano that reared white-cone tall, the crown jewel in a mountain range rising far to the north of Tree Melisen. He pulled Eliana closer and wrapped one arm about her. She did not resist his embrace. “Hang on!”
Matt blinked. Suit canted over to horizontal using its onboard gyroscope. Another blink, a thought, and a shrug worked new miracles. The avionics package came on-line. Faceplate imaged Dreedle’s Trunk, established an artificial horizon ball, and magnetic impellers in his boots kicked on, adding horizontal delta vee to their swooping fall. His airspeed climbed to high subsonic. Gees pulled at them as the fall vector curved into powered flight. The slipstream shield protecting Eliana vibrated sharply.
“Mata Hari ?”
“Monitoring,” said a calm voice in his mind as the PET relays in his scalp touched him, enfolded him, and told him he was part of something much larger, something immanent, something unique in the universe.
“Dispatch two Defense Remotes to Hover and Monitor as backups.”
“Complying.”
Silence again occupied Suit’s interior, except for the wind’s howl outside. Eliana didn’t speak or struggle, showing only deep calmness. An emotional calmness quite different from her sharp temper. Where did it come from? What depths lay within this unique woman? Blinking, Matt made sure Eliana’s jumpsuit had its own eco-controls—he didn’t want her frostbitten from high altitude cold. Did she understand that his refusal to land at the Port was meant only as a lesson to her about the nature of his work—and the value of doing the unexpected?
Whatever. Time to work. With a thought, he changed his perceptions to ocean-time.
One hundred forty milliseconds spun by.
Faceplate showed green, red, and blue light data icons scrolling by, with bio readouts on the left, mech readouts on the right and in the middle, a false-color picture of the ground painted by the pulse-Doppler radar on his chest. Far too fast for human eyes, its narrow aperture microwave signal caressed an alien landscape, feeding a digital datastream that built up reams of compressed data in his forebrain’s databyte nanocubes. On his helmet, the flat plates of his phased array Over-The-Horizon radar sampled half a continent, feeding his contact lenses a subsidiary image of incoming shuttles, commercial aviation traffic, and No Threat from the other Mother Trees.
Nine hundred seventy milliseconds.
His ears roared to the howling squeal of Port Melisen Traffic Control. Someone was yelling about procedure and ordering him to obey proper civilian traffic rules. Matt ignored them, but allowed Suit to send back a standard IFF signal. One that carried his identity, his Vigilante contract number, his Patron ID . . . and a request to shut off all ground-to-air missile systems. Otherwise, Suit would take them out.
Two seconds.
Silence greeted his IFF signal.
Two and a quarter seconds.
Suit intelligence showed him a virtual reality holo that located exactly Port’s offensive weaponry embeddings—including the gas laser ballistic missile defenses. That was dangerous stuff, but defeatable with the adaptive optics that covered his outer Suit, lying among the sapphire seeds like flowers floating atop a rain-speckled pond. Only his gauntlets lacked laser protection—course, each Suit finger carried its own laser for close-up combat. Sighing, he mind-signaled Suit. Its Tactical CPU then presented Options. Matt rejected Generic Lifeform Extinction or a Needs Help alarm to Mata Hari. Putting Localized Decimation on standby, he repeated the IFF.
Three seconds.
Silence greeted his ears. But on the virtual reality holo, Threat cones blinked off for all Port weaponry, including the gas lasers and their targeting radars. He smiled. The Derindl were at least pragmatic.
Three and a quarter seconds.
“Matt . . . we’re there,” said Eliana.
Indigestion. Washout. Step-down.
“There? Oh. Thanks.” Matt blinked, returning to pale, slow organic reality. He cleared his faceplate, put Suit on Standby Defense mode, and inspected the approaching abode of a planetary leader.
They flew now in Middle Canopy.
The Trunk of the Autarch loomed in front of him like a brown pillar holding up the sky. Limbs thicker than his height speared off in all directions, interfingering with other Trunk limbs. About them flew avian lifeforms native to Halcyon, their iridescent feathers shimmering like star opals. Scores of Derindl, each enclosed in their own versions of single-person Remotes, flittered from Trunk to Trunk on missions of grand insignificance, personal privilege, or intimate need. They were a beautiful people and they flew through their city treehouses the way others traveled roadways.
Suit landed on the wide limb that served as the entryway to the Trunk. Two hundred meters below his boots, buttressing arch-trunks burrowed into the dark, dank, litter-strewn soil of Halcyon, an anchor against cyclones, tornadoes, and the vagaries of sapient symbionts who sometimes forgot to do their “grooming” job. Next to him, Eliana tottered to an upright stance, smoothed out her jumpsuit, and looked at him with that deep internal calmness that so puzzled him. Was it her return to the Tree biome, the return to the familiar, that now made her so calm?
She winked at him. “Some elevator ride.”
Matt couldn’t help grinning. “You’re a good sport.”
She turned serious. “And you take unnecessary risks.” Moving forward, she reached up to a green leaf big as a dinner plate, but fringed with sharp edges. She touched an edge. The leaf shuddered. She drew her hand away and held it against her side—but not before he noted a tiny pinprick of blood on one fingertip.
“Eliana? What was that all about?”
She shrugged, her calmness changing to apprehe
nsion. “Just saying Hello to Mother Tree Melisen. You should—”
“Welcome,” said a contralto voice from over their head, speaking in colony Greek. “Welcome, Daughter Eliana Antigone Themistocles, Human-Derindl, of Colony Olympus. Is the lifeform next to you a guest?”
“Yes, Mistress.” Eliana looked up at the Trunk’s dark brown bark. “He’s the Vigilante I hired to—”
“Understood,” said the assured voice. “Enter.” Before them, the solid bark-skin of the Trunk puckered up, withdrew to the sides to form a circular orifice, and froze, beckoning them into a yellow-lighted anteroom. “Please have your guest stand still for a moment so your Genetic Donation may be sprayed upon his suit. Otherwise . . . .”
“I understand,” Matt said.
In the anteroom Eliana stood to one side as, from above, a rosy red mist englobed Suit. When it was done, Matt looked to the far side of the chamber. “May we see the Autarch Dreedle? It is most urgent.”
“Certainly,” said the same warm voice that had greeted them out on the limb. “I am coming. Patience.”
The reply startled him. So the Autarch answered her own door? At her own Trunk office? Just how informal were the Derindl? Eliana seemed just as surprised.
The brown wall opposite them puckered open. The Derindl Autarch stepped into the anteroom in a rustle of robes. Matt inspected her closely.
She was tall and elfin slim, but possessed of a direct expression and flame-red hair that hung to her shoulders. From those shoulders hung a spider-silk robe, its colors a shimmer of blue and exotic rose stripes that complemented her height. The sheer robe was nearly transparent. Underneath it, her body was naked, very feminine, and very alluring to any male humanoid of the mammal persuasion.
Very human-like she was. Hands, arms and feet were nearly human, except for an extra finger and toe. Her delicate ears flared to a point like a fairy of old. Her nose was a bit puggish, somewhat flattened, but not unattractive. High cheeks glowed with a rose blush. And her eyes . . . her two brown eyes were luminous and deep. Too deep. Matt gasped, aware that Eliana watched him with some amusement. As did Dreedle herself.
Then she smiled.
Pointed teeth.
Those pointed teeth were probably nothing more than an evolutionary remnant from the Derindl’s distant fruit-bat ancestors, but still . . . . The effect was vampirish and called to mind other ancient vidpics, ones less comfortable than those of Paladin, the Lone Ranger, and similar tales of times when justice depended on the personal strength of one man. Or one woman. Matt looked away from her teeth, his gaze dropping.
The rest of her was quite satisfactory. Under the robe she showed two breasts in the usual place. A nanocube fed him their function: they provided direct blood-to-blood transfer for the infant, rather than the antibody-filled milk normal to humans. Jerking his eyes away from ruby nipples, Matt moved further down. A wasp-waist curved into flaring hips. Soft red curls darkened her pubis. When she turned—as if reading his mind—he caught sight of her prehensile tail lying in the cleft of her buttocks and moving under her robe like something alive. She pirouetted around on long-muscled, gymnast’s legs, her eyes catching Matt’s gaze with a challenging look.
Even though Eliana stood beside him, Matt got hard. Hard from the sheer animal sexuality of this alien woman. A woman who made love to a Derindl man just like humans did with each other. Unable to resist the impulse, he let Suit sniff the air. From her floated a scent of lilac and mint. Damn . . . .
The Autarch canted her head . . . in a deliberately Human gesture. “May I see you, Vigilante? One inspection deserves another.”
Eliana grinned. “Go for it, Mistress! He’s got good pectorals. And a nice rear.”
Humph. Turnabout was not always fair play. But who said life was fair? However, he mind-edited his waist level appearance. “Certainly, Autarch Dreedle.”
Matt blinked. In an open space of the anteroom Suit projected a holo of him standing at parade rest, and fully nude, but with no sign of his arousal. The holo image rotated slowly for the Autarch’s intense, thoughtful inspection. Suit froze the graphic any time she signaled for a closer look. Her eyes roamed over his holo body, looking here, looking there, invading him. As he had invaded her. Damn. He’d been too long from human company. Long enough to forget thoughtful courtesies like extending privacy when someone was crying. Or holding them when they needed a hug. Eliana watched him while Dreedle inspected, her eyes measuring him, her expression both Tree calm and human hopeful. The Autarch faced him.
“Thank you, Vigilante,” she said. “You exhibit human genetic patterns indicative of a mixture of Franco-European, Amerindian, Scots and Polynesian sub-racial types.” Her voice tone was analytical and command-brisk. “Is this correct?”
“Correct.” This Autarch, Matt reminded himself, was a planetary leader with a brain, someone able to call upon the resources of an ancient, highly efficient society. “I am pleased to complement your study of human genetic variations. May we converse here, or in your office?”
The Autarch glanced neutrally at Eliana, then nodded at him, but not in the human manner. The nod was more of a hunch-down of the neck, followed by a outward chin-thrust. “We may. Please follow me out of the anteroom.”
Matt and Eliana followed Dreedle along a curving corridor, up an inclined ramp, and into a spacious office that lay half inside the Trunk and half outside, with a translucent bubble extending outward. The yellow sunlight of Sigma Puppis B cast a warm glow on a green grass carpet, from which rose two woven-fiber couches. The Autarch took one, then rested her right hand on the thin metallic case of an AllCall datapad. Eliana joined Matt as they both sat on the other couch. With a sigh, Eliana reached down, pulled off her jumpsuit boots, and ground her toes into the room’s grass carpet. She seemed at home, at peace. Was the Tree the source of her calmness? Whatever. Ignoring the whirr of Suit, Matt faced Autarch Dreedle, giving the alien woman his full, professional attention. She returned his gaze with equal intensity and professionalism.
“Vigilante, you sought an audience with me?”
“I did. Thank you for welcoming me to your home.” The Autarch just watched him. Matt got to the point. “You and Caste Aggressor have not attacked the Stripper since your last defeat one year ago. Why not?”
Autarch Dreedle nodded, Derindl-like. “Why not? Because I dislike losing my people to the processing vats of the Stripper. And because it was apparent that mechanical violence at our level was ineffective.”
“Have other approaches been effective?”
The Autarch smiled mysteriously—and very human-like. “The Stripper is still there, still active.”
Eliana leaned forward, choosing to participate . . . which surprised him. “Pardon, Autarch. But have the other Trees been unable to suggest more effective courses of action?”
“All our efforts have failed.” The Derindl woman returned her attention to Matt. “Vigilante, I assume you have a reason for not destroying the Stripper from orbit?”
“I do.” He filled her in on the Mican’s threat and his response. “A more subtle approach seems desirable.”
“Quite.” A visibly shocked Autarch Dreedle turned to Eliana. “Daughter, has Clan Themistocles been unable to bribe the Halicene Conglomerate into withdrawing its Stripper?”
Eliana flushed rose-red. “We have failed in that also. I apologize for my kin-people, Autarch. The decision by a prior Despot was unwise and—”
“Will lead to the devastation of my planet, my people, your people and our joint offspring,” Dreedle said harshly. The Autarch turned back to Matt, her manner urgent. “Vigilante, do you have a plan?”
“I have tactics. And an idea.” He smiled pleasantly through Faceplate. “Tell me—are your Trees able to do industrial-scale polymerase chain reaction copying of a sample DNA codon? A virus?”
“Yes!” Dreedle smiled back Derindl-like, with her tongue protruding; it was something else seeing it in real-life rather than just reading about it in h
is Library datadump. “Our Genetic Manufactory can do this. How many liters of this virus do you desire? One million? Two?”
“Uncertain, but perhaps only several thousand liters.” Matt thought quickly, wondering just how effective the spyseeds of Halicene Conglomerate might be, whether the Autarch herself had already been suborned, and whether Halcyon’s atmosphere was even now being seeded with a viral vector that would need only a signal to go plague-active. “Do you have facilities for aerosol dispersion?”
“We do.” Dreedle seemed impatient. “What else do you require?”
“Many things.” Matt stood up, Suit whirring with restrained power. “I need samples of the slag left behind by the Stripper. Plus the complete technical readout on it—to the extent obtained by your soldiers before they died. Also the rate of heavy metal buildup in your aquifers and the ore storage mode used by the Stripper.” He blinked an order to Suit, imaged a PET signal to Mata Hari, and smiled reassuringly. “Autarch, your Tacticians have command of the data I need. Maser-feed it to my ship before I leave.”
Autarch Dreedle stood up in a rustle of robes, her expression concerned. “You leave so soon. Don’t you trust us? Is that why your ship won’t land at the Port and why two Defense Remotes now hover above my Trunk?”
“Autarch, I trust no one.” Matt turned, gathering up Eliana with his eyes. “Come, Patron. It’s time we visited Olympus and your Human colony. Perhaps we can ‘talk’ to the ex-Despot of Clan Karamanlis about his barter deal with Halicene Conglomerate.”
Eliana stood, appearing uncertain as she glanced from Dreedle to him and back. “Autarch? By your leave.”
The Derindl ruler nodded, human-like. “Go, my Daughter. I hope your service to the Tree will be successful.” The Autarch turned to Matt, her professionalism gone, her feminine allure turned to maximum overload. “Vigilante—will you avoid destroying my planet in the process of cleansing the Stripper?”
Heading for the exit rampway, he called back his answer. “If possible, Autarch. In the meantime, please order your forces away from the Stripper, avoid further attack, and advise my ship when any Halicene craft comes in-system. Eliana?”
Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) Page 10
