Star Vigilante (Vigilante Series) (6 page)

But he valued privacy and was not a voyeur. “
Mata Hari—what the hell are you doing?”

“Protecting you,” she said tensely, her voice coming from a side wall acoustic membrane.

“From what?”

“Watch.”

With his room still dark, Matt watched, feeling impatient and irritated. “Well?”

“Observe.” The wide-screen view of Eliana, lying face down, narrowed suddenly. It zoomed in to focus on her right ear.

Eliana stirred, shifting her head to one side. Her delicate nose and finely sculptured cheekbones glowed with infrared warmth, framed by the cooler surface of synthsilk covering the bed platform. At one side of the holosphere scrolled green light datastreams, depicting in agonizing detail her carbon dioxide exhalations, her REM eye movements, double heartbeat systolic and diastolic pressures as revealed by a diode laser focused on her carotid artery, skin saltiness, moisture evapotranspiration from her skin, and scores of other biophysical details. On the holosphere’s other side scrolled red-light Threat assessments.

“What is it?”

“Watch!” insisted Mata Hari
.

From out of the dark depths of Eliana’s ear came something.

Something sinister.

About the size of a pea, it floated upward, then expanded rapidly to the size of an eyeball. Then it became a fist-sized globe that bobbled on the room’s air currents.

Matt trembled. He’d allowed a bioweapon carrier on-board
Mata Hari.
“What the fuck is it?”

“Scanning. Passively. Be patient,”
Mata Hari said tartly.

Patience!
Matt stood up, able only to pace in front of the red and green glowing holosphere, his mind churning over Options for weapons, then discarding them, aware that such bioweapons often spored when under attack. A lot of good his weaponry wall would do him now.

At least
Mata Hari had had the good sense to scan passively the free-floating intruder. An active Doppler pulse or laser ranging beam could easily be the trigger needed to set off the bioweapon. What was its software programming?

“Interesting,”
Mata Hari
murmured.

On the holosphere, the fist-sized bioweapon globe drifted toward the locked slidedoor leading into the Spine hallway of the ship. Eliana’s stateroom lay a kilometer from him, with four dozen airtight lock-doors between him and her. Which were hopefully closing right now!

Eliana’s locked door hissed open. The bioweapon globe floated out into the Spine hallway, paused, then headed up-ship. Toward him.

“What’s interesting?”

“The bioweapon,” Mata Hari
said. “Passive x-ray fluorescence scanning, along with wavelength and quantum mechanical scanning, show it to be mainly an aerogel.”

“An aerogel? What’s that?”

“Some species call it frozen smoke,”
Mata Hari
said, her tone academic intense. “It is an ultra low-density skeleton constructed of tetramethoxysilane molecules which were originally a dense oil interspersed with water. Remove the liquid and you have a nearly transparent foam-gel whose lowest density can approach 3 milligrams per cubic centimeter. Your air weighs only 1.2 milligrams per cubic centimeter. That is why it floats on an air current in the eight-tenths Earth gee we maintain aboard ship.”

Matt scowled. “Gels don’t make doors cycle open. What did?”

“Checking,” Mata Hari
said hurriedly. “At the center of the aerogel is a small dense structure composed of chitin protein, polysaccharides, polyglycolic acids, the protein cytochrome-C, several rare earths, a mitochondria-sized power source, and several viral and plasmid chains in a cell-like container.” She paused. “The slidedoor’s electrolock was opened by a complex series of electron-shell wavelength shifts issuing from within the cell container.”

Dimly, Matt remembered that the protein cytochrome-C aided in electron transport during respiration and photosynthesis—in biological systems. “Is the power source oxidation, chemosynthesis, or photosynthesis?”

“Ultraviolet photosynthesis,”
Mata Hari
said tersely. “Watch closely.”

In the holosphere the aerogel globe enlarged to fill the yard-wide space, then expanded beyond as
Mata Hari
focused on its core nodule. The ship began passive scanning of that inner structure, relying upon quantum wavelength electron shell shifts to illuminate the structure’s interior. A dim image built up in the holosphere, one of winding coils. It was a retrovirus programmed to seek out, infect, and destroy a very specific type of lifeform. Him. Or, at least a male human since Eliana lay unharmed.

“Options?”

Mata Hari
held silent an unusually long time.

“Well?”

She laughed softly. “Patience is a virtue in both organic and inorganic lifesystems.”

Matt relaxed. She wouldn’t joke if she hadn’t found a solution. Optoelectronic memory systems that thought at the speed of light were nice. Even if he sometimes felt like a poorly endowed relative, with only native instinct to offer up to their partnership. “Options?”

“Aerogels don’t dilute laser light or other coherent energy forms.”

“You mean we can simply blast it?”

“Maybe.” She paused again. “But that’s too simple an answer. Why is it here? Why does
she
carry it?”

The Anarchate held answers for every horror. “Some local Anarchate despot is tired of humans and wants to test out a self-replicating viral plague before going after the rest of us?”

“Perhaps.” Mata Hari’s voice echoed off his stateroom walls. “But why a Singleton like her? Why not a whole colony? The Anarchate is, if anything, relentlessly efficient. It would not waste something this unique on a single being.”

Matt watched on a sidewall screen as the aerogel headed relentlessly his way, opening and closing the hallway lock-doors as it came to each one. It was now just three hundred meters away from his stateroom.

“Maybe it’s not an Anarchate bioweapon,” he said. “Lots of species can bioengineer this well. Including humans. This could be the answer for why she was allowed to reach me.”

“Perhaps,”
Mata Hari
said. “But is this the product of her brother Ioannis, the group Pericles, or some other stupid organic? You know, Matt, you humans have a tendency to make terribly destructive mistakes even when you get a second chance.”

He fumed. “Tell me something I don’t already know. What do you recommend for a destruction option?”

Time trickled away. On the wallscreen, the aerogel virus globe now lay just two hundred meters distant. In front of him, in the holosphere, its viral coil glowed redly.

Mata Hari
stirred in his mind, but spoke aloud. “Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly. “I’m sure a laser will burn it to a cinder before it can spore.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” An old, old memory welled up inside his hindbrain. A memory of something he’d learned as a cloneslave decanter in the Flesh Markets of Alkalurops many, many years ago. “
Mata Hari
,
do you have the capability to emit refrigerated carbon dioxide into the Spine hallway?”

“Not normally.” Pause. “I can reroute some biorecycling tubes.”

“Do it. Quickly!”

“Target point?”

“Try for Lock-Door Fourteen,” Matt said. “That’s six more minutes at the float rate of this aerogel.”

“Complying.”

He felt hungry. Blood hungry. He felt this way anytime someone, or something, sought his life. Matt didn’t care whether the bioweapon retrovirus was programmed to kill him, or simply co-opt his higher thought processes and make him into a Trojan golem. A golem who would then seek out other humans and infect them, a living, moving, breathing plague bacillus on a giant scale. No, he cared only that someone sought to kill him, to still the beating of his heart, to end the memories of a hard life among the stars. In the iridescent darkness of his stateroom, Matt turned and stared into the watery blue depths of his aquarium, remembering past Hunts. He trembled, all too eager to kill.

“Ready,”
Mata Hari
said anxiously. “Will you share your thought processes on this Option?”

“Yes. Search under Fires. And Snakes. It’s dual-encoded in my memories.”

“Accessing.”

Long ago, on a starship of the Third Wave, a human starship that still retained many old redundant safety systems—in the human pattern—he’d come across a pressurized cylinder stuck away in a long-abandoned storeroom. Later, after enduring a neurowhip lashing from his alien stevedore boss, who let him know unequivocally that curiosity in indentured servants was not welcome, he’d learned the cylinder’s purpose.

It was a fire extinguisher.

Not the ancient Halon system. Nor the more modern local-vacuum systems. No, this system relied on the expulsion of freezing cold carbon dioxide under several atmospheres of pressure, directed at the fire source—or a warm-blooded pest lifeform. Either method replaced the oxygen needed for combustion with carbon dioxide. Or instantly froze the warm organic shell of shipboard pests. Like rats. Or snakes. He smiled at the puffer-fish.

In the holosphere the aerogel approached Lock-Door Fourteen, pausing to emit its decryption signal.

Gases flooded the aerogel globe.

A white ball dropped toward the hallway deck plates, threatening to shatter its icy coating.

“
Mata Hari!”

“Got it!” The white globe steadied. “Did you really think I wouldn’t use a tractor beam?”

Matt’s heart thudded to adrenaline overload. “Big joke! Don’t worry me like that. Is it frozen solid?”

“Yes. According to the sonogram I just took.”
Mata Hari
sounded very confident. “I’ll route it through the exhaust duct system to the outer hull and expel it—after coating it with a self-igniting polymer explosive. The polymer is time-set and will explode twenty seconds after it feels vacuum. Satisfactory?”

“Sounds good.” Matt watched as
Mata Hari
deftly ejected the bioweapon into the vacuum lying within the Alcubierre Space-Time Bubble. The aerogel disappeared from the holosphere and was replaced by an image of Eliana. This time she lay on her back, one arm across her stomach, the other underneath her head, the soft mounds of her breasts rising as she breathed slowly, eyelids shut as she dreamed. Her lustrous hair spread over the bed like black satin cloth, framing her fine-boned face. She was beauty allied to a puzzle. Why did she hate machines, and computers in particular?

“What do you wish done with her?”
Mata Hari
asked.

He sighed. “Do you think she was aware of being a mule?”

“No.”

“Does she carry any other bioweapons?”

“No,” Mata Hari
said in a soft, reassuring voice. “After isolating her room and pouching it out through the external ship skin, so it could be pinched off in case the probe awoke other bioweapons, I active-scanned her. There are no other bioweapons within or attached to her.”

Except for her mind, he thought, admiring Eliana’s strong intelligence and stoic courage in accepting a very dangerous assignment for her people. “Recommendations?”

“I am curious about human females,” Mata Hari
said. “And she cannot harm me. Keep her. She is, after all, your only Patron.”

And also a woman—like you pretend to be
. “So be it.”

Matt turned and laid back down on his bed, his mind far too active for sleep. Too many questions plagued him.

Who had seeded Eliana with a bioweapon?

Why did
Mata Hari
wish to keep a dangerous Patron, rather than toss her into the vacuum of space? Did she really want to observe a live human woman in action, thinking and doing as women do? As Helen did, his pain-memory reminded him. And when would Translation end?

Most of all, Matt wondered why his mind still recycled images of a seductively nude Eliana. The images aroused him. They brought forth hormonal responses that he barely repressed. Worst of all, they evoked erotic memories of Helen. Of the yellow-haired Asian woman he’d once loved, but who had left him. Left him alone with only the memory of her love.

Love
.

Such could never be possible with Eliana.

He had realized after her departure from the Bridge what she must think of him. One machine now ravaged her planet. Another machine had made her a crossbreed, an outcast to both peoples. And after seeing him crouched within the Interlock pit, interwoven with the lifeweb of a machine intelligence, Matt must seem to Eliana the worst of all worlds.

A cyborg. Neither fully human, nor fully machine. An abomination, an atrocity—something that willingly bonded with an intelligent computer, that was not
people
. Through choice, a human machine allied to a computer machine--failing to see the
::
group entity that was how they thought of themselves. Matt could deal with provincialism. But racism . . . .