Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (32 page)

“Hello, Matthew,” whispered the image glow of his
Mata Hari symbiont, full of happy feelings as she lifted a Mauser rifle and sighted along its length. Aiming for a target. The freighter target. Imitating his instincts, she showed herself ready for combat. And Matt could tell she felt happy. How, he knew not.

“Hello, partner. It’s good to be . . . working with you like this. Again.”

No other words were exchanged. Not by mind-image. Not by slow skin twitch. Not even by slower eye blink. None were needed.

Gestalt
. Or, what the AI called Complete Identity Overlap.

Within his ship body, Matt moved as one moves about his house, a place familiar and comforting. A place where you knew every little detail. He left nothing to chance and nothing was left undone. Endlessly he cycled through his domain, checking, touching, sniffing, feeling, intuiting . . . and ecstasy was his constant companion.

There is, truly, nothing to compare with
systems checkout
.

Time passed. Eliana remained patient. And Matt existed as the uplinked, integrated, biocomponent of the ship named
Mata Hari
.

One hour passed like a century—but so fascinated was he by all the nooks and crannies of Ship that he never felt a moment of boredom.

When the robot freighter passed their picket line of passive sensorProbes, the ship was ready and on station next to a large asteroid. Like a double-image, Matt stepped-down from ecstasy, moving just a little out of identity-sync. It was necessary, if he were to operate slow, organic instrumentalities for the benefit of Eliana.

He licked his lips and blinked. The forward holosphere showed the image of the intruder. “
Mata Hari
,
display the weapons systems carried by the freighter.”

“Complying, Matthew.” She sounded breathless.

Eliana jumped to the sound of his voice, the first speech she’d heard from him in an hour. But she did not speak to him, only looked more and more concerned as the armed freighter filled the holosphere. His Patron could tell they were but moments away from combat.

The holosphere image became a sectioned schematic of the Halicene ship. Rotating axially, it showed him the freighter’s weapons. Which weren’t much. The ship carried only a few hydrogen-
fluorine laser guns, outrigger plasma cannons, and a single belly pod loaded with a few nuclear torps. Most of the craft consisted of automated repair and fabrication shops, as expected. To the side of the holo image, scrolling data columns glowed purple in two places.

“What’s that?”

“We are being ranged by its pulse-Doppler radar, Matt.”

He smiled. Stealthy avionics packages were fine for some engagements, but in this one they wanted the opponent to find them. “
Mata Hari
,
detonate the Offense Probe.”

On screen, behind the robot freighter, a twenty megaton thermonuclear warhead detonated. It had been riding inside one of his outlier picket sensorProbes, not attracting attention to itself. Until now. In the holosphere, the freighter’s autotracking gun pods swung back toward the glowing radioactive cloud.

“
Attacking!
” In his mind’s eye, Mata Hari
dove like a screaming eagle, her talons outstretched. “I’m launching our own KKP submunitions and Nanoshells.”

“Good. How long before they arrive?”

“Six minutes.” The claws shone bright.

“How soon before the freighter’s in reach of our HF lasers?”

“Three minutes.”

He thought quickly. While the neutron antimatter pontoons were the ultimate weapon of
Mata Hari
or any battleship—since they could not be turned aside by electromagnetic shields that deflected charged particle beams—they stayed coherent only over short distances. Also, it took a lot of power to generate antimatter in quantity. Recharge time between each shot was two seconds—a lifetime to computer senses. Other lightspeed weapons were better for long-distance engagement.

“Matt, I’m emitting the mercury vapor shield.”

“Good.”

Engagement would occur soon.

Once again, he marveled at the weapons systems of
Mata Hari.
While much of what she held was similar to top-of-the-line Anarchate weaponry, the mercury vapor shield was unique. It was a variant on the old-style mercury absorption clouds used by sublight cargo-carriers to deflect incoming particle radiation, radiation that piled up on a sublight starship’s nose like water before the prow of a ship.

Light glimmered.

Between
Mata Hari
and the freighter there billowed a five thousand kilometer square screen of vaporized mercury. Mercury vapor had long been used as an absorber and deflector of laser beams, but
Mata Hari
had developed a new adaptation. Out in space, the mercury molecules were charged, and linked into a single electromagnetic field. The screen-field, controlled by thousands of nanoware computers seeded among the gas vapor molecules, opened and closed holes in the gas shield—at totally random intervals. The opening times for these holes were known only to
Mata Hari
and its Fire Control programs. Which programs fed into every weapon system aboard
Mata Hari.
The holes allowed
Mata Hari
to shoot at an opponent, but their enemy’s beams were deflected or absorbed by the vapor. Of course, the vapor shield was a static defensive tactic that didn’t work if your ship had to maneuver a lot. But if you could force your enemy to attack along a predictable vector . . . .

“Firing the HF lasers, Matthew.”

Light is far speedier than even the fastest hypervelocity shells or missiles. Blue-green laser beams speared out to the freighter, making the holosphere flare. At the same time, the freighter fired at them.
Mata Hari
suddenly vectored sideways—but not enough to disrupt its own firing solutions through the gas shield holes.

Light flared along one pontoon of the freighter.

“A hit!” Matt felt overwhelming excitement.

“Maneuvering,” his partner said hurriedly as one beam from the freighter penetrated through the gas shield.

Mata Hari
rotated, emitting mercury vapor close to the hull. Within his double-self, his skin crawled, as if ants were walking over him. But it was only the adaptive optics seeded into the ship’s skin—already they were contracting, changing to concave form, and throwing back the burning heat energy from the enemy laser. In milliseconds
Mata Hari
shifted spatial orientation again, putting its narrowest cross-section face-on to the freighter. Even as it shifted, it fired excimer, CO2 and neutral particle beam lasers. They reached out through the randomly opening mercury gas clouds. In the holo, death came to the freighter.

“Matt, our Nanoshells have penetrated their hull.”

“Excellent!”

That was it.

Like an overripe fruit filled with worms, the freighter’s hull burst open. Thousands of nanoborers and nanoware energy-seekers penetrated the hull, sought and found local area powerplants, infiltrated nuclear torp warheads, reprogrammed their software with decadent software viruses, and broke the electromagnetic safety seals on the main fusion bottle of the freighter. Even as he received thousands of tachyonic data inputs downshifted for his slower gestalt senses, Matt’s eyes were dazzled by brilliant, actinic lights erupting in a score of locations.

In the end, it was a race between which would go off first—the ship’s fusion bottle turning into a miniature nova, or her stored nuclear warheads turning into plasma. Forty femtoseconds later, only a radioactive cloud occupied the space where once the alien freighter had flown. He let out his breath in a rush.

“We won!” Matt blinked and fed a soporific into his bloodstream, seeking calmness. With a start, he remembered Eliana, still sitting patiently nearby, relief now showing on her face as she observed the freighter’s destruction. “Mata Hari
,
what do the Nanoshells say about ship manufacture, origin and encrypted software instructions?”

His symbiont glowed in his mind, equally excited, and somehow just as adrenaline-pumped. “It was a Beta-class Repair Freighter/Corsair. Built by the Upsilon Carina dockyards of the Halicene Conglomerate, Directorate Level Aleph. Sixty years in service and unmanned by organic lifeforms. It was run by an industrial algorithm AI with only minimal sentience. Most recently, it was in-dock with the Halicene MotherShip
Obliteration
. . . in orbit about the F5 giant star.” Vigilante paused, her mood sobering. “There is other data related to maintenance schedules, asteroid mining duties and such. Do you wish a data readout?”

“No. Encode it in the Library and into Tactical and Strategic CPUs.” Matt thought a second, sitting back in the Pit seat. “Any evidence of a continuous tachyonic signal link to Legion and the MotherShip
Obliteration
?”

“Yes. That signal shut off nine hundred femtoseconds ago. They know we did this.”

“Shit.” Legion had been taking no chances. In case the automated call for a repair ship had been due to his and
Mata Hari’s
actions, the robot ship held its own version of a deadman switch. The tachyonic carrier signal was probably a simple, multiplexed one that fed a one-way datastream back to Legion. The Mican must already be looking at a Tactical analysis of how he and
Mata Hari
had just defeated the repair ship.
Time. Too little time
. He blinked.

“Leave a holo decoy behind the nearest asteroid. Then we retreat halfway back to Zeus Station. Agreed?”

“It fits my software’s own Tactical recommendations.” His symbiont sounded confident but also slightly worried. In his mind, her glow-image showed the Mata Hari persona working on a recipe in her pretend kitchen, the closest analogy she could make to what she really did inside the ship. “Complying, Matthew.”

Behind Matt, Eliana struggled in her crash-padding. “Matt! I’m suffocating in this thing. Can I come out?”

“Sorry, Eliana.” He split his attention, part to
gestalt
-mode where he could monitor interior ship status and tactical developments, and part to human-mode—for his Patron’s benefit. And his—he couldn’t believe how the sight of her, sharing his triumph, filled him with joy. “We’re still on Combat Alert, in Battle Configuration and I expect another attack at any moment.”

“Another attack?” Her face paled. “Who this time?”

“Legion and
Obliteration
the MotherShip, who else?” Frustrated by her slow sensory speeds, Matt wished briefly for a direct neurolink to her—so he could download all that he saw and felt and perceived. Doubtless she would not appreciate the cyborg experience. “We destroyed their robot repair freighter—rather too easily. Now, Mother is due shortly, I suspect.”

“Mother?”

“
Override!
” wailed Mata Hari
.

Ocean-time
.

Immediate.

Urgent.

Nine hundred picoseconds
.

In his mind, across his manifold senses and before his eyes, Matt felt space-time itself move.

MotherShip
Obliteration
arrived.

Space-time warped, shuddered, and tore as a starship over eight kilometers wide Alcubierre Translated into the middle reaches of the Sigma Puppis B system. Gravity wave tidal shocks rippled all the way to Halcyon, shaking Zeus Station in its orbit. The other planets in the Derindl home system also vibrated to the arrival of imported space-time.
Mata Hari,
being much closer to the giant MotherShip, rocked hard.

Four hundred milliseconds
.

Matt felt astonished that Legion would ignore basic stardrive safety parameters by materializing within the stellar gravity well of the local G5 star. It could be done . . . but you risked sharing space with a fist-sized rock, resulting in immediate matter-to-energy annihilation. And too close to a planet would knock it out of orbit. What did Legion know about local system space that he didn’t?

One second
.

“Matt?” Eliana called.

He slowed his speech. “Wait!”

One and a quarter seconds
.

On screen, a second gravity wave pulse hit them, then a thermonuclear explosion blossomed
behind
them, not far from Zeus Station.

Incredible. Legion had just wasted a scoutship by forcing it to Translate deeper into Sigma Puppis, where it had exploded near to Clan Themistocles’ Trade Station. Why?

One and a half seconds
.

Insistent gongs signaled numerous incoming comlink signals. Matt ignored them all, reaching out for
Mata Hari,
speaking in PET-relayed thought-images. “Partner—what do you project from Legion’s actions so far?”

One second, five hundred twelve milliseconds
.