“We can’t be together. I would infect you.”
“Matthew!”
Isolation enveloped him. Isolation protected him, better than Suit had. No touch came within. None went without. Forever would he be a cyborg . . . in touch only with another machine.
The armorglass cracked and spiderwebbed to a tremendous impact.
Matt looked up.
Eliana held in her hand a KKP gun.
She must have had it in her coat pocket all this time. Hidden from him and ignored by a Changing Mata Hari. She aimed to the side so he wouldn’t be hit, and fired a second time.
Mata Hari hadn’t interfered. Perhaps because she had not aimed at him. Perhaps because his symbiont was so involved in the inner changes with the Restricted Rooms. For whatever reason, the KKP charge had struck his isolation chamber. The armorglass stood before him, badly fractured.
Like his life.
Like his heart.
She threw the gun at the fractured glass.
It broke into pieces.
A hole appeared, one big enough for a hand to enter.
Eliana ran forward, reaching out.
“No!” he screamed.
“Yes!” She reached through the hole and touched him. “I love you.” Her tears gone, her expression determined, she grabbed for his hand. “Matthew, I’ve made my choice. I choose to be with you for as long as you live. For as long as we both live!”
Matt gripped back her hand, his fingers intertwining with her fingers. Looking up, he saw the voiceless fury of Ioannis. With a blink and a thought, he canceled the image, sending Eliana’s brother back to the snake pit of his political machinations.
“Eliana,” he whispered. “I love you too.”
“Matthew!” She smiled fiercely.
For a moment, he believed life might yet be fair. That there could be hope for such as them. Hope . . .
The ship shook.
Internally, in his cross-connected cyborg systems, Matt felt Mata Hari flare its fusion thrusters, change vectors, and push out of parking orbit. Away from the onrushing shapes of Anarchate Inspection Golems. In the distance, the menacing black globe of the Nova now moved toward them. An inbound Emergency All-Hail signaled to him, demanding immediate cessation of movement . . . or they would be destroyed.
“Mata Hari! Resume parking orbit!” said the signal from the Anarchate battleglobe.
“Matthew?” Still holding his hand through the breached canister, Eliana looked up to the ceiling. “What’s happening?”
“I will not obey you.” Mata Hari said to the battleglobe in the hard-sounding male voice, a warrior’s voice bereft of feminine softness, caring or empathy. What the? The Decontam Chamber dissolved suddenly as the ship depolarized its matter, throwing him and Eliana together. They stood now in the middle of the Biolab, no longer isolated from each other, but facing something he’d never faced before—a mutinous AI. Or . . . was it a ship with two minds, one of which had only now come online after who knew how many years of silence?
Matt spoke and thought simultaneously. “Self-Correct Routine A64 Prime Aleph.” Dimly he recalled his early lessons with Mata Hari, after its rescue of his lifepod.
Nothing happened.
“Matt?” Eliana said uncertainly. “What’s going on?”
“Trouble.” He hugged her close. “The ship’s moving out of orbit. The Nova is preparing to fire on us.”
“Matt!”
He shared her fear. He tried again. Cyborg that he was, Matt still perceived all external space images and all internal ship systems. He image-thought explicit orders under the lightbeams that touched him. Optical neurolink had never failed him.
His efforts affected nothing.
Nothing happened in the Drive power rooms. Nothing happened in the Core NavBanks. Matt could perceive everything that now happened, but was cut off from all influence on his partner.
A living ship.
He’d forgotten that. That it was alive, with a will of its own. Or, rather, with two wills and two personas. And the one he knew as Mata Hari had disappeared? To where?
All about them the ship’s flexmetal deck and wallplates rippled, flowed, assumed new shapes, and moved him, Eliana and the Biolab somewhere else. Deeper into the inner core of Mata Hari, far away from the Bridge and the Spine. Where was it taking them?
The lights went out.
“Maaatt!”
“It’s all right! I’m with you. Hold on tight!”
She clutched at him. Together, they held onto each other, a cyborg and a crossbreed with too much hope.
In the neurolinked senses of his mind, Matt felt deeply this new Change as a new mind modified the T’Chak Dreadnought he had once thought of as his friend and partner.
Like a sleeping hawk who suddenly takes wing, his ship unfolded all of its weaponry capabilities. And not just the weapons he knew about. Things of unimaginable power and ferocity were coming on-line. Compared to these things, appearing by the will of Mata Hari herself, Matt felt the weapons he’d earlier used were puny. Like an ancient .45 automatic pistol compared to his laser Magnum. Or more accurately, to his plasma torps. These . . . these things were at least ten orders of magnitude more powerful than anything he had ever used in his seven years as a Vigilante for hire. The Restricted Rooms lay open to his gaze. Marvels lay inside.
Matt entered, cataloguing each new wonder.
In place of his old Bethe Inducer that could make a sun go nova, on-line came a quark-based graviton field. This field could literally compress any sun into a neutron star just kilometers in size, while forcing its photosphere outward. Outward as wave after tidal wave of sterilizing radiation. Planets would crisp within that caress.
Next to the quark-field loomed something else. Something that did not exist fully in this space-time. Something that only glowed. Glowed with escaping neutrinos. He had no idea what it was.
In a different Room lay something Matt did recognize. Supplementing his two neutron antimatter pontoons, four more pontoons appeared, for a total of six AM cannons that could spit antimatter annihilation at any opponent.
On the outer hull, the bristling HF and CO2 laser projectors were crowded aside by five new bulging pods that connected directly to the Alcubierre Drive fusion bottle, and to subsidiary fusion backups. Flickering about the five pods hung a sense of unreality, of time disjointed. What? Suddenly, he placed the weird feeling. Translation disorientation! Somehow, these pods contained the ability to project Alcubierre pocket universes—just like the main drive. But why?
Then, like a giant clearing its throat, a two kilometer-long accelerator funnel took form in the central axis guts of Mata Hari. At its base flared the largest plasma generator he’d ever seen. Along its length and at its front end spiraled superconducting magnetic field coils. The magcoils would direct the resulting plasma globe outward, then up, down, sideways—in any direction. But unerringly at its foe. His mind churning with log scale math figures, Matt realized that this axial plasma gun alone contained enough energy to shatter the crust of a planet. With one shot. This weapon was a world-wrecker.
Lastly, and most terribly, he felt the new mind appear from deep within the stygian depths of Mata Hari. A mind unlike the normal, reasonable persona of Mata Hari. This mind matched the hard-toned warrior-male voice he’d been hearing more and more lately. It felt like a . . . a BattleMind. Compared to it, Mata Hari’s normal persona seemed pale and uncertain.
Trembling, he thought his query. “Who are you?”
With but a minor feed from its powerful central cortex, the BattleMind answered him . . . as simultaneously it moved across the femtoseconds to confront an Anarchate Nova-class battleglobe. Like far distant tolling bells, Matt sensed and heard the Threat alarms and Option presentations. The Anarchate’s black globe had sensed his ship’s Change, powered up its own systems, and now shot toward them, scattering tiny Inspection Golems the way a shark scatters minnows.
Doom impended.
“Who am
I?” spoke a bell-like voice. “I am BattleMind. Also Destruction Device Six Hundred and Forty-Seven, of the 94th Imperial Dynast of the T’Chak Imperium, late of the Magellanic shipyards and the Lacunae Mindworks.”
Ohhhh, shit.
Eliana had heard. He could tell by the way she trembled as they held each other. They shook with cold—besides the lights, Mata Hari had also cut off the local enviro-controls and anything else that used energy which it could bring to bear on the Nova. Matt tried again.
“Where is . . . my Mata Hari?”
A buffeting roar of crude laughter shook him, both mentally and physically as its answer rebounded off the Biolab walls. “Your Mata Hari? How amusing. She was an autonomous mind that I created and placed in the Bridge, though she did not know it or know the purpose of the areas you labeled Restricted Rooms. It was necessary to present a persona that could pass unchallenged in these strange star fields. That job is now completed and she has been confined to her Memory Pillars.” Puzzlement briefly touched the BattleMind’s voice. “It has been too long since the T’Chak visited this part of the galaxy. My task is clear. Defeat this unit outside and return home with a Threat status report. I am expected.”
“Idiot!” Eliana screamed her frustration. “It’s been two hundred thousand years since anyone heard from the T’Chak! There’s no one left to report home to! They are all gone from the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
“Gone?” Matt felt the BattleMind recede a little. “You are mistaken. Do you think your species are the only ones capable of stasis? My masters await me, slumbering in stasis. Of that I am certain. Their last signal came from just outside the place you call the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
“How long ago came the signal?” Eliana said frantically. “Maybe you’re just an insane algorithm, still following orders from beings long dead, who cared not for you!”
In his mind, Matt felt doubt loom inside the new Mata Hari. But only briefly. Inside the BattleMind, that doubt died quickly. “I have my Mission. I have my Duty. Those are enough. And anyway, in time, I will return to the resting place of my Masters, report to them and invite them to refute your lie. Now be quiet. I have work to do.”
“Please,” Matt said before BattleMind fully withdrew. “Give us lights, heat and a view of the attack. If we are to die, at least let us see it happen.”
“Die?” A receding laugh echoed their way. “Hardly. This unit cannot defeat me. Watch and learn.”
Lights came on. Eliana’s long black hair fluttered to a blast of warm air. His yukata robe dropped from the ceiling and Matt put it on. A holosphere appeared. Around them, side-by-side accel-couches rose up from the flexmetal floor. They fell into them, but still held each other’s hand. Eliana turned to him.
“Matt!” She pulled his head close and kissed him.
He kissed her back. “Eliana. My Eliana.”
New determination filled her pale face. “I am yours. You are mine. We are together now. And we will defeat both the slow virus and this . . . aberration that has displaced your Mata Hari!”
“I hope so.” Matt held hands with her as they both turned to watch the holosphere.
The Nova attacked.
As before with the Halicene starship Obliteration, the Anarchate Battleglobe shot out two black beams of neutron antimatter. They hit as soon as Matt and Eliana saw them.
Or almost hit.
In the back of his mind—where he still took a much-dampered, much-downlinked datafeed from Mata Hari’s successor BattleMind—he felt one of the new pods activate. It emitted a sheet of Alcubierre space-time between them and the incoming antimatter beams. It did this before the beams arrived. Tachyonic FTL senses do make a difference.
In the holosphere, they watched as the antimatter beams hit the black sheet of distorted spacetime and disappeared. Displaced somewhere else, to wherever the Alcubierre pocket universe existed.
Another pod activated and a flanking sheet took form. Then two more pods came on-line, setting up dorsal and ventral sheets. With its Alcubierre shields now in place, Mata Hari fired back.
The axial plasma funnel coughed up three plasma globes, one after the other. The purple globes sped toward the Nova, moving at slow sublight speeds.
HF lasers fired at point blank range, quickly passing the plasma globes.
Particle beam accelerators glowed with subatomic fire and spat out antimatter neutrons, feeding the six AM pontoons. The coherent antimatter beams shot through the newly deployed Alcubierre shields.
On the Nova’s black hull, six massive gouts of total matter-to-energy conversion products appeared. Like little suns, they glowed. A globe twelve kilometers wide flared like a dozen suns.
The Nova staggered in its vector swing, large chunks of it eaten away by Mata Hari’s antimatter cannons. The Anarchate globe fired back at them with hypervelocity missiles, proton beams, CO2 and HF lasers, and excimer lasers. But all were stopped by Mata Hari’s Alcubierre spacetime sheets.
Matt realized he was seeing, for the first time, the projection of flat Alcubierre spacetime pocket universes. Rather than the strictly globular pocket universes heretofore used for transport star-to-star. But that was not the end of the battle.
An Anarchate Nova is not without power.
The deeply wounded globe shimmered with Bethe Inducer startup fields, preparing to turn Mata Hari into a few molecules of neutron star.
Mata Hari completed its attack.
Just as the plasma globes impacted on the Nova’s outer skin, finishing the fragmenting job begun by the AM cannons, his ship fired again.
From the graviton-field Room.
A brilliant yellow beam of coherent gravitons flared suddenly, instantly in the debris-strewn vacuum between Excellent and Mata Hari. Matt closed his eyes, but his mind still burned.
Eliana screamed. “No!”
Outside, in the cold immensity of space, a thousand Anarchate beings and the twisted remains of a Nova battleglobe, just . . . imploded.
They imploded past the neutron star stage. Imploded into matter so tightly compressed that it wrapped the field equations of normal space-time around itself and disappeared from EMF view. Only eventually, through the Hawking tunneling effect, would the small grain of sand that had been the Nova ever show its presence to Riemannian space-time.
And declare itself as a tiny black hole.
It was over, the battle was over.
In less than half a second.
Now, it was their turn.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the sudden silence of the Biolab, Matt abruptly recalled the meaning of why he had been in Decontam—before Mata Hari had changed her nature. Before one AI mind exiled another AI mind to captivity. He looked at his love, sitting in the accel-couch next to him.
Eliana looked worried, but not worried enough.
She was infected! She should be wondering how many years she had left. And how many years would she be a crippled crone, unable to control her bodily functions, unable to feed herself, unable to clean herself. Unable even to make love with the man whose fate she had chosen to share. He sighed, cherishing her distraction as all about them the Biolab walls flickered to colors rainbow-like, new holospheres blinked on and off as the BattleMind ran lightspeed fast through itself, becoming more familiar with its ancient capabilities.
It was like a newborn baby, in a way.
Matt could see why organic life was something so precious that the Greeks had schemed, misled their Derindl allies, and fought for the full spectrum neonatal placental units. Love led to making love. That led to the need, the desire, the wonder of having children. The only immortality yet known to organic life came from living on in one’s children. But he and Eliana could never have children without a placental unit—they were too genetically different. Or could they? Could a Pure Breed human, which was his birth genome, fertilize Eliana’s crossbreed eggs? Could they . . . have children?
He reached out and caressed her long hair, marveling desperately at the se
nsation. She turned, meeting his eyes. “Matthew, what is our future?”
No lies must stand between them. “We will be together. For a while. Until the virus kills us, or until Mata Hari discards us.”
“Will it?” Her eyes searched his, demanding truth.
“We can only ask.” He thought-imaged, calling aloud his question. Calling to the BattleMind formerly known as Mata Hari.
“Yes?” rumbled a distracted AI voice.
Matt’s body jerked to Interface overload as his entire body was forced into ocean-time as the warrior BattleMind/Mata Hari spoke to him at the speed it thought, flooding him with more inputs than he had ever experienced.
“Matthew!” Eliana held him as he spasmed in every muscle.
Too much.
Too . . . much.
Four hundred femtoseconds.
Images flooded his mind. The ship now moved across the ecliptic of Sigma Puppis system, heading for deep space as fast as possible, reaching for the heliopause and the safer way of going into Alcubierre spacetime. For its own reasons, the AI now spared the eleven planets of Sigma Puppis the gravity wave disturbances of in-system Translation.
His mind expanded, reaching to the heliopause. Seeing and feeling everything.
No one now opposed starship Mata Hari. No other ship came their way or hailed them. The cargo Remote sent by Ioannis had long moments ago dropped off Matt’s payments, picked up Grandfather Petros, and now moved to dock with Zeus Station. Voices innumerable squealed and squalled all across the electromagnetic spectrum. Their only common language was fear—of him, and of his ship.
Halcyon lay cleansed behind them. The Halicene Conglomerate stood defeated. Autarch Dreedle held power, but was cursed by the presence of a shipwrecked Anarchate base Commander. Perhaps Chai would not blame Autarch Dreedle for the actions of Mata Hari. Perhaps the alien would just pursue him and Mata Hari across the galaxy—once a replacement Nova globe arrived in system. And maybe the Anarchate would fear him and his fellow humans, instead of the true foe—a rogue starship whose new AI mind refused to accept that its masters were long gone, extinct, unable to give it the sense of purpose that every mind—even AI minds—needed in order to live.
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