Matt smiled at their eagerness. Not yet, he told them via PET thought-imagery. Checkout done, Suit delivered a new display to his central faceplate, devoted solely to the Ariadne shuttle that floated on Nullgravs in a belly cargohold.
He smiled at the fake emblem of the Anarchate, an image of the Milky Way galaxy speared by a lightning bolt. That was a nice touch by Mata Hari, along with the actual ID number from a shuttle that had recently arrived at the Intelligence dome landing field. While it was unlikely a crew of pirates would know Combat Command data, Matt liked it when his AI partner took care of the small details. It reassured him that bigger details, like the watch on the approaching Morrigan corvette would continue, as would planning for the offloading of the Omega refugees once they reached Morrigan. The planet’s capital, Lisdoonvarna, had a very large central park that could accommodate the two kilometer length of starship Mata Hari. And landing amid meadows, shrubs, clusters of oak and willow trees, and a small creek that bordered one side of the park would be a welcome relief from long days inside his starship.
Matt arrived above the cargohold that held Ariadne. Clearing his central faceplate he called to his partner. “Mata Hari, pouch me down through the floor to the cargohold.”
“Certainly,” she said, her mind image still that of the Barbarian Queen with a saber sword and a look in the eyes one would not wish to see on a dark night.
His boot Nullgravs lowered him to the level of the front airlock for the shuttle. It cycled open for him. Matt pulled himself inside using a helmet tractor beam emitter. The lock door closed quietly behind him, then pressure locked. The inside lock door cycled open. He entered the front passenger area, looking for George. His companion was not seated in any of the two rows of seats that could hold twenty passengers. Smiling to himself when he could have just asked Mata Hari to image George’s location to him, he turned right and strode into the separate pilot’s cabin.
“Hello, Matt,” rumbled George as he stood to one side of the room, his combat suit fully activated except for his helmet, which was folded back atop his broad shoulders. The man’s Van Dyke beard was twisted with a smile. The kind of smile one gets when a wish is granted.
“Hello, George.” Matt smiled through the central space of his faceplate but maintained the images of starship Mata Hari on his right quadrant and of harvester ship Powerful on his left. Verifying that George was cross-linked to his tachlink com, he called to his partner.
“Mata Hari, have you placed your limpet complink near the harvester ship’s Navigation computer?”
“Yes, Matthew,” she said, then appeared beside him in the small pilot cabin of the shuttle.
Matt gaped. “What, uh, how did you—”
Mata Hari’s hawk-like look showed a brief smile. “Added some holo emitters to Suit’s front panel. Allows me to be with you and George in image, though not much in substance as aboard our ship. You like?”
Matt liked this surprise. “I like. Did some of your SpyEye floaters and SensorBead gyrocopters also follow me aboard?”
“Of course. Along with Seek/Identify sensors, software viruses, tachlink Sensor Remotes, poison gas sensors, and some nanoBit computers for lock decrypting. And my limpet complink is ready to take over that ship’s Nav computer once you enter Powerful.” Mata Hari gestured with her sword toward the normal light image of the harvester ship, which lay just fifty kilometers away from Mata Hari. “That will give us control over the pressure doors and hallway access. Should reduce your active opposition.”
“Thanks. And I like choosing my encounters versus dealing with my opponent’s choice.” Matt eyed the distant image through the shuttle’s quartz crystal viewing band. As ordered, the Powerful had ceased acceleration and now floated beside Matt’s ship as the two of them headed out-system at one quarter lightspeed. The Morrigan corvette was only now approaching the orbit of the seventh planet. It lay several hours journey behind them. For Matt, that was just fine. His business with the genome slavers would be long over by the time Mata Hari passed the corvette as his ship headed in-system to planet three. “Well, George, why don’t you join me and Mata Hari in the passenger compartment? There is no need for you or me to pilot a craft that is part and parcel under the control of Mata Hari’s mind.”
George followed Matt and the chain-mail clad Mata Hari out to the front rows of seats, near the front airlock. That was the one that would be docking with Powerful’s mid-ships airlock. Most likely one of the crew would be just beyond the inner airlock door to greet them. Matt liked that. One more obstacle that would not stand long. As they sat, the ship launched them toward the harvester ship. Thinking of the brief surprise his presence would be to any crewman or captain watching via a videye, Matt welcomed the insect swarm of hundreds of Mata Hari’s sensors and nanoshells. They would do their thing in parts of the ship while he and George headed for the cargo area that would likely be holding the fifteen captives. His memory of cloneslave decanting service on Alkalurops said genome slavers did not treat captives well. They provided only the minimum food, water and temp needed for the captives to arrive alive and available for resale, after flesh samples, sperm and eggs were taken to create cloneslave babies. He bit his lip, hating what he had done in the past in order to survive. Well, he could now make up to Charlotte his failure to invite her to join him on his skimmer ride into Alois Port. She would have been one more family survivor—if he had not been so focused on pleasing his father. Blinking his eyes, Matt turned his attention to George, who now had his helmet securely attached to his combat suit.
“George, did you get in much practice with that Magnum handgun?”
The red-faced man nodded behind his helmet’s faceplate. “Yes,” he said, his voice arriving via the inbuilt tachlink communicator. “An hour of normal light target shooting, then a second hour of shooting by way of infrared and UV imaging. In case the lights go out after we arrive.”
Matt liked the attention George had paid to plausible defense options which the harvester crew might take. “Good. It is indeed likely that whatever ‘daylight’ is present in this ship will die once the captain realizes this is a hostile takeover. Course, shortly thereafter Mata Hari will have control of all ship systems via her limpet complink. So this ship will not be able to run away, lose its air in a hallway, or do anything without the agreement of Mata Hari. Who, as you see, will also be with us.”
George smiled behind his clear faceplate. “I like it that she will be here. She was nicely patient with me during the fitting of this suit, and in the target practice.” The man twisted in his seat to face Mata Hari. “Thank you, Lady of the Sword, for helping me be a help to your Matthew.”
Mata Hari, sitting across the aisle from the two of them, showed George a grim smile. “You are welcome. And now . . . we are arrived. Our airlock attachment is cross-linked to the ship’s hull and front airlock. Shall we depart?” she said, standing up and bringing her sword to port-arms, with the blade edge facing outward.
Matt rose, enjoying the smooth feel of how Suit’s exoskeleton worked with his own, cyborg-upgraded muscles, bones and biochemistry. Suit could sense when he wanted extra power to any limb, felt sick and needed help from onboard nanoDocs, or needed fast wound healing and counter-shock therapy. With a blink of his right eye, Suit’s virtual reality display now shifted to show the outer hull of the harvester ship with Ariadne attached in parallel mode in his left faceplate, while his right quadrant showed a guesstimate of the airlock area and adjacent arrival room based on corvette schematics that Mata Hari had accessed during their ten hour trip to this rendezvous. Matt moved up and entered the small airlock, with George squeezing in beside him, followed by a swirl of Mata Hari’s Remotes and sensors. Matt preferred to encounter the ship’s crew with overwhelming force and shock.
“Mata Hari, take over this ship using your limpet complink the moment we enter their ship. And disperse—”
“Understood,” interrupted Mata Hari via his neurolink, but did not make her impatience with his redundant
words clear to George.
Biting his lip, Matt nodded mentally to himself. Aloud he said “Thank you and let’s do this now!”
The air exhausted, the shuttle’s external lock door slid open to reveal the outer hull airlock door of the harvester. Mata Hari’s mindshape squinted human-style. “I’m broadcasting an image of a suited-up Commander Chai as one ticked off Spelidon who wants instant obedience and the airlock door had better open in one second or he will—”
The harvester’s lock door opened inward, revealing a lock space slightly larger than their shuttle’s space. Orange light came on at the ceiling and, with a grinding he felt in his boots, the outer airlock door closed behind them. Matt wondered what reaction the appearance of him, George and Mata Hari was drawing from viewers of the airlock’s interior videye. Perhaps an order to lock the inner access door?
“Complink control established, Matthew. And the effort by the ship’s captain to lock the inner door has been blocked. It is opening now. There is an insect-like Brokeet alien waiting on the other side. It is armed with a laser handgun that is holstered now, but—” a garbled screech sounded in Matt’s helmet and inside the lock, so that his and George’s external mikes picked it up—“it has been ordered to kill us. It is reaching for—”
The inner lock door slid sideways. Matt went suddenly to ocean-time even as his right faceplate quadrant showed the interior schematics of the harvester, with a blinking green dot showing the location of the captives, courtesy of Mata Hari’s access to the ship’s computers. He lifted his right hand and pointed five fingers ahead. In five nanoseconds power reached his fingertip lasers that had been tuned to chitin-punch. Five beams shot toward the upright figure of an ant-like alien wearing a crew sash and nothing else on its giant body.
The midbody arm that had lifted the laser handgun fell to the floor, slowly, in seven-tenths shipboard gee. A second laser separated its globular head from its narrow neck, while three beams slid down its body, cutting deep gouges through its thorax and abdomen. A white noise nanoshell hit its comlink and blocked any further communication, while Matt’s right biceps thumped as two titanium penetrator darts loaded with biogel poison spurt forward and entered its corpus, overloading the dying heart. He stepped forward, one boot kicking aside the limb with the laser handgun. He turned left down a shadowy hallway that led toward the rear of the harvester.
“Got your back covered, Matt,” came the slow rumble of George’s deep voice, the words duplicating the situational holo that now filled his central faceplate quadrant. George was indeed pivoting to point his Magnum handgun up the hallway to cover anyone approaching from the ship’s nose. Mata Hari materialized between them. Matt noted with satisfaction the dispersal of her sensors, SpyEye floaters and sensorBead gyrocopters in all directions. Distantly he became aware that this ship held twenty-eight lifeforms, judging from infrared sensors that occupied every room and whose output Mata Hari already accessed. Fourteen humans were gathered in a rear cargohold of the starship, with two humans occupying a forward cabin, leaving a total of twelve alien lifeforms present in the ship, not counting the dead Brokeet alien. Five aliens now headed his way. They would soon be inside the hallway that he, George and Mata Hari stood within. He smiled. Matt liked it when vengeance walked toward him.
Leaning forward as if into a headwind, Matt clunked forward in his boots. With a thought he activated his chestpack’s pulse-Doppler radar. Its millimeter waves painted an image of two Spelidon rats approaching with their long tails held high, an Orko hippo-alien lumbered along behind them on four stocky limbs, an ant-like Brokeet alien was running ahead of the group, and a Mican griffin-tiger brought up the group’s rear. Each carried a laser handgun or higher power rifle. Sighting Matt sixty meters downhall from themselves, each alien lifted weapons toward Matt and George. His mind formulated words for tachlink expression to George.
“Stay behind me! And do not laser any of these aliens. They are mine! Personally.”
Matt PET image-thought his intentions to Mata Hari so she would not interfere, then he focused lightspeed senses on the weapons of his five opponents. Femtoseconds whizzed by. Picoseconds sped along. Nanoseconds tick-tocked. He counted six hundred forty-five nanoseconds since they had physically entered this hallway and Mata Hari had taken control of ship systems. Not yet a second. Distantly, the five weapons glowed with discharge initiation. Coherent beams of burning light reached out and impacted the front of Suit.
Three beams were deflected away as his sapphire crystal adaptive optics met the frequency of the lasers. But two lasers from the Spelidon rats burned into the carbon-carbon ablative coating of his right leg and left hip. Shifting his Suit stance to bring into play sapphire crystals that had not been burned away, Matt began to run toward the five aliens.
Suit hit a speed of forty kilometers per hour as his boots activated mag-grippers so he could really run in the light gravity of the ship. In his mind, Matt was anticipating impact with the aliens. He hungered for it. And as the image of his brown-haired sister Charlotte suddenly glowed in memory pain, the Brokeet ant alien was within contact range.
Matt raised his left arm, made a fist and then smashed through the alien’s thorax midbody, separating its body into two pieces. Behind him Mata Hari ordered several virus Remotes to impact the twitching remains. He ordered his left shoulder pulse-cannon to reverse aim. It did, firing a yellow beam through the Brokeet’s globular head, ensuring the extinction of thought.
One second whispered Suit’s onboard CPU.
Matt raised his right hand, spread his arms to either side, ignoring the additional laser beams as some of them scored black slashes across his ceramic armor to expose its ablative layer, then he slowed his run enough to spread his fingers.
Grabbing each Spelidon rat by its neck, Matt lifted both bodies and swung them together in front of him, smashing craniums together, then twisting fingers to decapitate heads from dying bodies. He let go of them, knowing Mata Hari raced along behind him, with George further behind as his human partner raced down the hall with him, but still casting rearward views as directed. The man’s laser Magnum was pointed rearward, as Matt had ordered. Between him and Mata Hari buzzed more sensorBeads, penetrator darts with poison biogel and white noise nanoshells. He looked ahead at the rapidly approaching Orko hippo. Its four eyes were widening with shock as it imaged the death of three crewmembers. Matt brought his gauntleted hands together, grip-locked them and aimed for the area beneath the alien’s blocky head.
Impact! murmured Suit’s onboard Tactical CPU. One point five seconds.
His locked together fists broke through the Orko’s chest and collapsed its central heart underneath. It rolled backward. Matt trampled its long body, pulling his hands out and flaring each fingertip laser along its scaled underbelly. A nanosecond image showed its innards opening the way the insides of a deer might open when sliced by a hunter’s knife. He leaped beyond the dying body, leaving its awareness to die under the onslaught of Mata Hari’s biogels and ultrasonic beams from George’s combat suit. Mentally he blinked for a status report on all lifeforms in the ship.
In his central faceplate came the image of the ship’s rooms and hallways with alien lifeform placements shown. Eight aliens still lived, but six of them had retreated to inner cabins, perhaps seeking safety. Ahead of him the Mican alien approached. But the eighth alien form was moving from the rear engine room toward the captives’ cargohold. Was it going to kill them before he got there?
Ahead of Matt the Mican griffin-tiger spat its shoulder-mounted laser at him. It hit his left shoulder laser cannon, putting it out of action. The alien sped up its four-pawed run at him and then leaped into the air, aiming for his chest. He didn’t have time for the satisfaction of ripping the griffin-tiger’s wings from its shoulders. George could take care of it. Bending his combat armor faster than normal, he passed under its flying body. Behind him his Suit speaker spat “George! Take care of the Mican!”
Two hundred milliseconds h
ad passed since Matt’s lightspeed senses had detected the alien approaching the cargohold.
Matt turned right down a ship cross hallway, then turned left down its central accessway, aiming for its rear section and the sole access door to the cargohold. He ran flat out, hitting fifty kilometers speed even as Mata Hari twinged him gently to say he could have used Suit’s built-in Repulsor block to fly down the hallway faster than he was running. But she admonished him with a ferocious smile. Her eyes in his mind view showed the merciless look that Matt knew he wore every time he felt the memory pain of the loss of his parents and four sisters. It was clear now that when he felt deep emotions of loss and anger, Mata Hari also felt identical emotions. So close had their mind-to-mind link become that she had become his avenging alter ego. As such she knew his worry about the approaching alien.
“Matthew,” she said via tachlink. “I’m speeding one of my floater SpyEyes toward the alien. It will impact its body, slowing it enough for you to catch it before it enters the cargohold.”
Sending thoughts of intense appreciation, Matt adjusted his helmet faceplate to illuminate the oncoming alien. He needed to know whether a simple physical impact would do, or whether he had to use his remaining shoulder pulse-cannon.
Two seconds, said Suit softly.
The engineer alien was another stocky, four-legged Orko hippo, its front arms carrying a heavy laser rifle the equal of his own Magnum laser rifle that was attached to his right hip. Its four yellow eyes were slitted like a cat, while its upper body was scale-armored. A crew sash crossed its left shoulder to wrap around the tubular body. Distantly, the sound of four blocky feet hitting the metal of the central hallway came to Matt’s sensorEars as they preceded him down the hallway. Mata Hari was right. Flying was faster.
The Orko was twenty meters from the cargohold entry when Mata Hari’s SpyEye globe hit it on the head. Plastic and metal pieces scattered in a spray. The alien slowed briefly, blinking its four yellow eyes, then tried to speed up its run.
Vigilante Series 2: Nebula Vigilante Page 16
