Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (26 page)

Ahead of him, distantly, a faint rumbling sounded.

The Stripper?

Matt increased his pace, anxious to face his opponent.

Run. Run, run, run
.

Later, around midnight, he felt and heard the rumble of machinery quite clearly. Matt slowed a bit, almost winded, but felt the need for caution. He’d made his calculations and cross-checked everything with
Mata Hari
,
but still . . . .

In the darkness, he topped the mesa he’d been climbing.

He saw it.

The Stripper’s blood red hull towered high above him. It reared into the night air, a moving cliff-wall. He stopped, still two kilometers distant, and took refuge behind a wind-sculptured sandstone pillar. Blinking, he adjusted eyesight to infrared, far infrared and ultraviolet. He set ears high, listening for the deadly whistle of a hypersonic projectile. By the time he heard it, it would be too late to react, but habit and training kept him on the Alert.

The hull of the Monster shimmered before his eyes.

The Stripper hulked six kilometers wide, six long, and a klick high. The hull was red steel, the shape boxy and flat on top except for its central wart-pillar. Lights glowed all over its armored hull. Matt blinked, bringing on-line telescopic views. The upper deck image wavered. He focused, seeking the objective of his naked trek into the belly of the beast.
Ahhh
. Heat-plumes rose from grilles set in the forward and rear decks.

The exhaust stacks fumed forth their malodorous and toxic gases, filling the clean desert air with hydrogen sulfides, carbon monoxide, vaporized heavy metals, and salts. Each of these strip mining waste products could have been cleansed—through filter sacks or settling ponds interior to the Stripper. But doing that would have cost barter-money. Far better, Halicene Conglomerate thought, to devote the Stripper’s full bulk to ore detection, stripping, smelting and ingot forming, with just enough onboard defensive weaponry to defeat the usual military forces. For ultimate backup, the Stripper carried its genocidal ecotoxin weapon.

It was the main deterrent to infuriated settlers who’d found out that contracts could be ignored by those who ruled whole star clusters. The contract was just for form’s sake, to show to the Anarchate provincial base if need occurred. Usually, however, no one could oppose the giant interstellar conglomerates. And many were only too eager to take their bribes, their promises, and their products—so long as they stayed alive afterward.

There was nothing fair about the Stripper, the Prime Dominant Legion, the Halicene Conglomerate, or the trail of devastation it left behind in Orion Arm. But no one cared. At least, no one in a position to do anything worthwhile about it.

Until him.

Stupid him.

Stopping the Stripper should be possible, although it had taken Matt a lot of planning and library research to figure out just how. It was dealing with the consequences afterward that still frightened him. He wished for no Pyrrhic victory.

In his mind, Matt reviewed once more the Stripper’s interior schematics, as revealed by his thermonuclear blast.

At its front, the Stripper possessed a shovel-mouth that took in everything—dirt, gravel, plants, water—and spit them out to either side, leaving the underlying ore rock exposed. Only the water was routed to good use. Flowing over hot interior metal, the water vaporized into steam, cooled the machinery, and was itself sterilized—all at the same time. On the ceiling of the interior hull, a plumber’s nightmare of coolant and collector pipes concentrated the rising steam, cooled it to dewdrops on the collector pipes, and funneled the resulting water into interior reservoirs. These reservoirs fed internal ore reduction vats that separated the raw ore from its surrounding matrix—after the matrix had been crushed in giant hoppers. The water washed clean the ore, served as a convenient “acid” to leach some ores not already processed by cyanide leaching, and—combined with mercury—floated other metals up and away from the ore matrix.

There were many metals crushed, melted, leached, floated, gas-centrifuged and otherwise extracted from the ore
body that the Stripper passed over. The transuranics were the most profitable and raw uranium was a sizable byproduct. But platinum, titanium, nickel, niobium, the rare earths and other high-value metals were also sought by the Stripper. They would be ingot-formed and tossed out for pickup by the robot freighter. Other minerals like iron ore would be tossed aside for later pickup by subsidiary contractors. But that subcontracting would happen much, much later—after all life had died on Halcyon. The Halicene Conglomerate cared only for the prime quality metals—the raw, partly eaten bones of the planet would be subcontracted out to some other company and Halicene would move on to a new star system.

The irony of the Alcubierre stardrive was that it made possible the economic transport of things which, with sublight stardrives, would have been prohibitively expensive to move from one star to another. Things like slaves and mass-heavy metals. Like all technology, the Alcubierre Drive was a double-edged sword, used for both good and evil.

Matt shuddered. In a way, the Halicenes sat like a spider at the top of an industrial foodchain light years deep, millennia old, and one integral to the commercial
laissez-faire
policies of the Anarchate. Good business meant deadly politics in the Anarchate—or at least that’s what he’d always observed. Still, the Anarchate diplomats and administrators had a reputation to maintain. They would destroy an industrial MotherShip—if it violated the Four Rules of the Anarchate. The Conglomerates were incredibly powerful, but no single corporation could stand against the Anarchate. No one could.

Sudden movement jerked him from his reverie. Matt watched as the Stripper ejected a refined ore slug. The slug flew up in a high arc, angled sideways, and came to rest beside the steaming, foul-smelling abomination that was the slag-trail left by the Stripper. There was no reclamation here. Only toxic waste, loss of top soil, loss of all lifeforms, and a sterility of the land more suited to a planet scoured clean by the blast of a star going nova . . . once a Stripper had passed by. Life and the Stripper were incompatible. So far, the Stripper was winning.

Work. Time for work
. He could no longer put off the inevitable.

How best to approach it?

The Stripper floated on outrigger pontoons that contained Nullgrav projectors, while its lower body snuggled into the six kilometer wide gorge it had cut into the planet’s crust. The metal sidewalls were not entirely shear, being fringed with claymore anti-personnel mines, fencing, support architecture and armor plating. Matt thought he saw a way up its side—between two laser tubes that pointed downward, at the ground, for cutting rock and ore. But all about the Stripper’s perimeter, dust and steam whirlpooled high as it cut, sliced and ripped through the soil. The sound deafened him, even two kilometers away.

Rubbing his ears, rubbing his nose, trying to get rid of the foul, stomach-turning odors, Matt stood up. On Defense Alert, he scanned the area.

Overhead floated more of the balloon dirigibles he’d seen on the original Defense perimeter. They were mostly sensor stations, carrying over-the-horizon devices for early warning of organized, mechanical attack by the Derindl. Moving more quickly were scores of smaller Remotes, each one a stupid AI brain with but one imperative—Protect against Attack. Backing them up were the onboard weapons pods of the Stripper.

The Stripper had long ago detected him. But it had done nothing to him.

Yet.

Moving along a diagonal track, Matt slowly approached the Stripper, bending down every now and then to pull some bunchgrass from the soil, to shift a rock, to scrape in the soil—any action that would look animal-like, rather than sapient. But more than that, he was counting on the fact that the Remotes were too intelligent, too expert-programmed to recognize him as a sapient lifeform. It was something he’d had to explain to
Mata Hari,
when she objected that the Stripper would surely match his vid-image to the Derindl, conclude he was a stupid unarmed Derindl, and just kill him. The visual recognition circuits of computers and AIs had long ago improved to the point where they equaled human eyes.

He’d laughed, then pointed out one thing
Mata Hari
had not noticed, being a machine.

He had no tail.

Without doubt, Legion or its functionaries would have programmed the Stripper to detect and kill any approaching Derindl. But humans had arrived so recently—in galactic time scales—that he suspected his people were not encoded in the Stripper as a sapient lifeform. Or, if Legion had encoded for humans, he was certain the Mican would never encode for a
naked
human without a combat suit. The griffin-tiger would never consider landing on the surface of a planet without the protection of its own combat suit. It was all a gamble, but one Matt was willing to bet his life on. So far, the bet had worked.

He went to all fours when he was within a hundred yards. Moving slowly, his ears overwhelmed by the wailing screech of metal against rock, his eyes lashed by strobing laser beams that crackled into virgin rock, and made lightheaded by exhaust fumes, Matt ignored the Remotes and the lasers and the horrible grating chomp up ahead where the Stripper’s maw devoured the essence of Halcyon. He ignored everything mechanical, everything constructed. Instead, he concentrated on acting like a quadruped, sniffing the ground, moving in an erratic search for plant food.

After what seemed like hours, he ambled into the stinging, biting cloud of dust, sand and rock fragments tossed out by the Stripper as it ate into the ground. Looking up, he squinted and sighted in on the hull bulge, where the laser tubes reached nearly to ground level. Then he closed his eyes, shielding them from flying grit as he stepped onto the Nullgrav pontoon. From here on in, he must rely on sound to guide him.

The flying grit increased as he walked slowly toward where the hull wall hid behind the swirling dust. Something sharp cut into his left shoulder. Blood dripped thickly. A fist-sized rock bounded up, smashing into his gut. He gulped. His head banged something hard and metallic. Standing upright, reaching high over his head, he felt for the sheer wall of the hull.

Found it!

Balancing on the outrigger pontoon, intensely aware he existed in the hot air between two thick laser beams that flared to either side, he leaned over the open gap between the hull and pontoon. His skin shriveled from the heat, his ears were blasted by the shrieking cry of split rock. Reaching up, Matt ran hands over the hull edge, seeking a handhold. He was not a free-climber like Helen had been. He knew just enough rockclimbing skills to avoid falling. And maybe to climb a thousand meters nearly straight up, with only random hull indentations, tubes, support struts and armor plating overlaps for support.
Ahhh . . . A handhold
! He pulled himself up, chest hugging the hot metal.

Everything was hot to the touch. The hull. The air. The dust. Would he have first degree burns before he reached the exhaust grilles?

Turning sideways and feeling with his feet and back, Matt braced himself against the two laser tubes that projected out from the hull. From a distance they had reminded him of a “rock chimney,” something like an open-sided smokestack that rock climbers could climb without pitons or rope. By a process of wedging yourself into the vertical chute of the “chimney” you could use friction and the strength of your leg and back muscles to gradually advance upward. But who’d ever done a free climb raw naked, exposed to heated metal, unable to open your eyes until you rose above the ground-hugging cloud of grit and dust?

Had Helen ever done this on the resort planet she’d worked on?

Matt didn’t know. There were so many things he’d never learned about her. And now, would never know or experience or share. But there was Eliana. Maybe with her . . . . Biting his lips, he climbed.

Bottom foot pushed low as a brace, upper foot rose up for the next step, and his back muscles pressed against the laser tube behind him. Hands flat behind him, Matt pushed down with his legs as he slid his back up the narrow metal chimney.

Lower foot brace, back slide, back tense, move upper foot, brace again and push.

Again and again he
pushed
, slowly moving upward.

Finally, when the horizon glimmered with a false sunrise in the east, he made it to a hull area where the laser tubes had disappeared, but other projections existed. Opening his eyes, Matt looked around.

The shadowy dark was lit only by the glow of melting rock around the skirt of the Stripper. Nearby, sandstone mesas rose half as high as the Stripper. Green plants wilted from heat, toxins or lack of water. On the Stripper, fumes rose up, gagging him, but he could breathe, thanks to the wind. Ignoring any damage done to his lungs, he felt joy.

Who notices a fly on the wall?

Turning round, pegging his toes and fingers into armor plate chinks, conduit ridges and radiator vanes, Matt free-climbed up the cliff-wall of the Monster that was the Stripper.

Something scalded his hands.

He yelled, almost losing his balance.

Blinking his eyes, he looked up the high metal flank, searching his opponent’s skin.