Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (38 page)

Adrenaline overwhelmed him. Interface feeds flooded him with status reports, Targets found and Decimated, Lock-Ons, Active rangings, reports from his Intelligence and Tactical CPUs, uplink feeds from his brain’s databyte nanocubes, weird radar images of building interiors, heat maps that flowed and ebbed like something alive, the gruesome yowls from his waistband nerve gas dispensers as—at last—they escaped his custody to seek out Target organics, and more. So much more.

This was what a true cyborg could do!

In that inattentive moment Matt took an HF laser hit on his left hip. He rotated and changed course in time, forestalling punch-through. He thanked instinct and he thanked Suit’s sapphire beads and adaptive optics skin. “
You’re welcome
,” they squealed back at him like little electron bees. Backtracking the beam track, he fired both pulse-cannons, destroying the combat-suited alien. It fell down the pop-up floor hatch through which it had appeared.

Somewhere deep inside him, something told him these were living beings he now killed by the half-dozen, their hand weapons badly outclassed by Suit. Beings who bled, screamed and felt fear. Perhaps later, he would regret the carnage. But now, survival was uppermost. You do not get picky about combat etiquette when a single lucky shot can hole even the best combat armor. But already it was coming to an end. The troops of Ioannis advanced behind a shield of hoverRemotes, their heavy laser cannons laying down an incinerating barrage that swept all before them.
Good!
Maybe Legion would now come to Matt.

Suit’s comlink crackled to a signal, reportedly from Ioannis. He blinked, throwing it onto his left faceplate, and ordered his reply stepped-down to human normal. Cyborg he was, cyborg he would stay—until Legion was dead. Matt dropped through a hole blasted in the floor by one of his laser cannons. Ioannis’ miniature image looked shocked, worried and smoke-blackened.

“Vigilante—is that you?”

“It’s certainly not Athena Parthenos. Speak quickly, I’m busy.”

Ioannis grinned lopsidedly. “Thanks for the help. We’re driving them back in most areas except Bonded Warehouse Districts Five, Seven, Twelve and Thirteen, and a drydock repair facility directly below it. Can you help further?”

“Yes.” A virtual reality graphic highlighted the areas Ioannis had named; they weren’t far away. “I’ll make a fast penetration there within two minutes. Your troops should follow, prepared to take advantage of my blitzkrieg impact.”

“Blitzkrieg?” Ioannis asked, looking puzzled. “No matter. We’ll follow.”

“Have you seen Grandfather Petros?”

“No!” Fury darkened Ioannis’ face. “I didn’t find out about his capture until your battle with the Halicene globeship. No one but me knew he was the colony’s Genetic Primary. But Legion arrived in a shuttle, attacked us and captured him in the confusion. I haven’t seen him or the Mican since.”

“Acknowledged. Out.” The relayed Vidcast blanked out. Matt shook off the step-down effect of organic communication.

A massive steel wall loomed before him like a granite cliff. Faceplate showed the wall separated him from the warehouse area named by Ioannis. At high speed, he dove for it. With a thought and a blink he fired both shoulder pulse-cannons, cutting a large hole. His backpack then launched a couple of three-kiloton nukes through the hole.

“Counting down,” murmured Suit’s Timer voice, sounding much like Eliana. “Time to blast: two seconds. One—”

Faceplate blackened. Matt folded up in Suit, an armored ball that now hurtled through the hole in the steel wall. Suit’s shielding would protect him from the nuclear blasts.

“Two.”

Double minisuns flared like high noon.

Just a thousand meters ahead.

Matt hardly felt the blast pressure. Nor did the heat-pulse hurt him. What they did to the cavern enclosure was something else.

The minisuns completely blinded the waiting forces of Legion, destroyed six warehouses, scrambled all tactical communications, and gave him the advantage of shocked surprise.

Faceplate clearing, Matt sailed into the radioactives-dusted warehouse district, his rear-looking butt radar telling him that Ioannis and his Greek forces followed, cannon floaters out front. Matt went back to
gestalt
perception.

Suit was him. He was Suit. Together, they were . . .

A horror.

Three aliens wearing Gorgen-model combat suits appeared suddenly on the far horizon of his Defense Zone, each painting him with radar despite the crackling disruption of the remaining EMF pulse from the atomics.
Targets!
Suit hungered. He hungered. The little voices of Suit hungered.

Suit’s onboard Defense algorithms hunted through Options, rejected thousands, and threw Matt down toward the roofs of the warehouse district. From all sides, coherent light blasts flared as ground combatants fired at each other. But the combat-suited ones focused just on each other. Only another suit was a worthy foe. His submunition carrier Remotes followed him down like a flock of friendly hawks—about to gut three pigeons.

The aliens fired first.

In mid-space, Suit’s laser beams slashed back at incoming hypervelocity HEDS shells. Helmet’s pressor beam narrowed focus to deflect a kiloton atomic, tossing it back at his attackers where it Safetied without exploding. Suit’s sapphire-coated skin flexed, warped and reflected incoming HF and CO2 laser beams as he rotated, twisted and dove behind the momentary shield of building walls. Behind him, walls exploded from blast-pressure overload as shells, laser cannons or tractor beams clawed after the Vigilante known as Matt Dragoneaux. Flying now on his back, he flared his left gauntlet, fingertip lasers taking out a flock of Hunter-Killer Nanoshell Remotes. They’d been fired by two of the aliens—just as his Magnum lasergun fired in the opposite direction, defeating an ugly-looking Remote that mounted a heavy proton beamer.

Matt played with them.

Like a cat plays with a mouse.

He enjoyed it.

He blinked.

Waistband nerve gas dispensers ejected shells to clear unsuited opponents from his local area. From helmet to boots Suit flared—for a few precious moments—with a high-gauss electromagnetic field. A field strong enough to deflect any incoming charged-particle beam weapons. Setting his boots on Colossus Mode, Matt stood up suddenly, stance frozen at ten meters above ground level. Invisible tractor beams shot down and Locked-On to metal deckplates, buttressing him. Then, from his helmet, multiple pressor beams reached out and uprooted whole warehouse blocks. Like a child’s game of pick-up-sticks, he tossed the warehouse blocks at the three aliens. The debris barrage blocked a new offensive wave of shells, beams and fields. His backpack
ka-chunked
. Once. Twice. Thrice. Four times.

A napalm warhead rocketed out at his enemies.

A tremendous fireball blossomed halfway between him and them. Then, through the flaming ball, sped three armor-piercing Plasma Shells. One for each opponent. Only antimatter is more destructive than plasma.

Purple light flared three times.

“
Ka-booommm!
”

The expanding napalm ball was pushed aside by three more violent explosions as the plasma shells enveloped alien powerplants, fried them, set off onboard munitions and carried minute fragments of flesh and gristle into all parts of the warehouse district.

It was over.

At least, any serious opposition from those forces of Legion who commanded Suits similar to his was over. Idly, Matt fired fingertip lasers at two spacesuited aliens trying to retreat from the incredible flares of atomics, napalm and plasma. Over the comlink sounded a cheer—from human throats. He ordered comlink signal step-up.

“Well-done!” Ioannis yelled over the comlink, as Suit confirmed the mop-up combat maneuvering of the Greek’s own forces. “Will you—”

“
Alert!
” Suit intoned, displaying a holo overlay showing two new Threat signals. Scrolling datastreams ID’d them as downlinks from his forward-searching NanoSensors, the ones programmed to detect Legion. They had picked up the unique sweat-odor-pheromone air trails of Legion and also Grandfather Petros.
Yes!

“Ioannis—consolidate!” he yelled back as the Greek approached in an armored combat floater. “Legion is now my Target!”

Suit launched forward on the air trail, twisting and weaving to avoid solid projectile shots from not-yet-dead Mican allies. It easily deflected back the few laser beams that made brief contact. Matt did not fire. He was low on reloads for most systems and the battle was not over until Legion was dead!

He dove into a low-roofed cargo transitway, Suit sensors alive to concealed limpet mines or EMF-activated explosives, anything that the Mican might have seeded in its hasty retreat. The odor trail turned left, grew stronger, passed through an airlock into the drydock area below the warehouses, then wafted toward a small freighter. The freighter’s engine compartment had been undergoing a refit. Holes gaped where hullplates or sensor pods had been removed to allow interior access. On his faceplate, the heatmap showed a cold powerplant. But minor traces of plasma-driven power units suggested a combat-suited someone had passed this way.

The Mican?

Matt dodged a hypervelocity HEDS shell that erupted suddenly from one of the hull-tears. His left shoulder pulse-cannon flipped over and incinerated it. Before he could fire again, faceplate showed the attacker had gone on Stealth-mode and disappeared into another part of the ship hull. BackTrack analysis of the HEDS shell debris showed Halicene manufacture.
Legion!

Matt floated just outside the freighter hulk, feeling uncertain.

If it were just the Mican, he’d have long ago tossed a plasma shell into the hulk and vaporized his problem. But Petros and the future of all Sigma Puppis humans was held hostage in there. Whatever his feelings about the greedy, patriarchal Greeks, he would never let any alien escape with sufficient human DNA data to force-grow human cloneslaves. Never that!

Dodging here and there, using intervening drydock buildings and machinery for cover, Matt entered the freighter hulk at its nose. He found only darkness.

His IR and UV senses flickered on, painting a heat map of the interior that augmented his millimeter microwave radar image. He could have chosen echo-sounding and sonograms if he wished or were under water, but these two sufficed. He moved rearward, knowing he did what the Mican wanted. But the Mican, like himself, would not set off a plasma charge under his feet. This had become too personal for both of them.

On his faceplate, an incoming Vidcast flickered.

“For a monkey primate,” Legion snarled, “you have some minor talents.”

Near Legion, the bound figure of Petros lay next to the clawed feet of the Mican. Petros seemed dazed, perhaps drugged, certainly not himself as Matt remembered him from Eliana’s first call to her grandfather. But for an old man with a gag over his mouth, he seemed to have held up to the Mican’s abuse.

“Legion, let the Greek go. You know only one of us will win. If you do, you can always reclaim him.”

“No.” Legion’s needle-tipped tail lifted sharply. “It amuses me to torture him. And to use him as bait for you. Advance, Vigilante—you will not be harmed . . . until we are in direct line-of-sight of each other.” The image blinked out.

He cursed. The Mican was undoubtedly lying, but how much?

Moving for the freighter’s outer hull, Matt read off the Vidcast BackTrack from his onboard EMF expert system. It confirmed as suspected that the Mican had used microwave bounce-signaling, from microwave rebroadcasters seeded into scores of ship nooks and crannies. The signal origin was untraceable.
Fine
. He blew out the freighter’s hullplates and emerged into the open air just outside.

If the Mican expected him to follow after it through booby-trapped hallways, he would disappoint it.

Nullgrav plates shot him forward.

Airspeed climbed.

He approached supersonic, though he had but three hundred meters to cover. The freighter’s stern loomed suddenly. Matt dove in through a hullplate hole, twisted, changed angle, and dove again. Toward where the ship’s powerplant had been emplaced, but was now removed. It was the only big space in a ship like this—other than cargoholds—and he preferred a lot of space between him and the Mican.

Matt flew through ship hallways in total darkness, the cave-like blackness illuminated only here and there by random UV and IR emissions. Then, his microwave pulses showed a large opening up ahead.
The engine room!
Preceded by Nanoshell sensor Remotes and submunition carriers, he entered.

A shadow moved.

Three hundred megawatts of hydrogen-fluorinelaser struck him square in the chest. The Mican’s combat exoskeleton had found him!

His chest radar pack burned off before Suit could rotate and reflect back the beam. Healing the blast-scorch as he dodged sideways, Suit fired back at the beam source, just missing the Mican when it dove behind a large metal housing. From there came Petros’ hoarse scream.
Damn!

Flaring his fingertip lasers in the general direction of the Mican, forcing it to stay under cover, Matt dove up toward the ceiling, a Plan in mind.