“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
had 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.”
Send
ing 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-l
egged 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.
Matt was thirty meters from the entry door. He was not going to run faster than a quadruped for whom four-footed running was natural. Sighing, he PET image-thought an order to Suit and his right shoulder laser pulse-cannon locked on, its green sighting laser putting a pinprick beam in between the central eyes. “Fire” he said mentally.
The Orko squealed from surprise, then pain as the yellow hundred megawatt laser beam cut into its bony head, then further inward, splitting its three-lobed brain into steaming pieces as the heat of penetration cooked its brain meat inside a natural cooker chamber. Its front legs collapsed under it. The forearms let go the laser rifle and, finally, the nerve impulses to the rear legs ceased. Its three hundred kilo body collapsed fully and slid along the hallway’s metal floor, leaving behind a wide streak of red hemoglobin rich blood.
Matt skidded to a halt outside the cargohold entry. Just four meters separated him from the alien. A thought caused his chest pulse-Doppler to emit microwaves enough to finish cooking the brain mass, while both biceps erupted with titanium darts loaded down with biogel poison that would disable any carbon-based lifeform. Their impact into the large body sounded wetly. Two pressor beams emitted from his helmet broke each leg, just as backup, while
nanoshell energy seekers bored their way into the mound of flesh, seeking any MHD power upgrade, anything cyborg-similar. While this mound of flesh would not collapse in on itself, it would smell for a good long while. At least, it would smell until Matt put his final solution into effect for the genome harvester obscenity.
Ocean-time
left him as he left Suit’s Combat Mode. He would need to see and relate at normal human speed when he saw the captives. Who, according to Mata Hari’s infrared monitoring were all alive, but surrounded by piles of waste and in poor physical shape. Women, children and several men lay on the floor or leaned against a wall. Ship sensors, fed through Mata Hari, told him the human captives were living in total darkness. Probably as a psych-warfare effort to kill any thought of resistance. Well, Matt knew how to take care of that.
“Mata Hari,
turn on the cargohold’s lights. But slowly! I want them able to see me and George when we enter. And partner, thank you for the sensor and SpyEye backup!”
“Happy to assist, Matthew,” said his AI partner as she approached down the central hallway.
Behind her came George, his suit scarred by three laser slashmarks, his hand gauntlets showing the red blood of the Mican’s body. Matt’s mind processed the image that had come in via tachlink of George taking on the Mican. It had been a physical struggle as one of the Mican’s wings knocked the laser handgun out of George’s grip. George, perhaps following Matt’s example, had grabbed the offending wing and broken it at the shoulder. The alien’s scrabbling response with foot claws had been blunted by George’s suit armor. The man broke the Mican’s second wing, then, wedging his armored helmet against the chest of the alien, George had reached up, grabbed the alien’s head in both hands, then pushed it rearward onto its back, breaking the Mican’s neck. George’s fists had then slammed into the alien’s chest, penetrating the heart area, bringing the blood that marked his partner’s gloves. Matt blinked at the natural strength of the man, then turned to face the closed metal of the cargohold’s slidedoor.
“Mata Hari, open the door please.”
She did so. Matt walked into the spacious room, followed by the lighter step of George. The holo of Mata Hari spread out to Matt’s left side, as George moved to his right.
People looked at them. Most of them looked with fear and fatigue. Two women with children held to their half-clothed chests show
ed the beginnings of hope. Four children between ages six and twelve crawled toward the nearest adult, their movements slow and painful as if they were in the grip of severe hunger and electrolyte starvation. Some adults were blinking their eyes from the sudden appearance of light. A middle-aged woman, sitting close to the cargohold entry, struggled to stand up. A younger man leaned over from his floor seat to help her. Together, they managed to stand. The rest of the adults lifted themselves from lying on the floor to a sitting or leaning position. Clearly the appearance of Matt and George was a surprise to them.
“Who are you?” the middle-aged
blond woman said, her voice a dry croak.
“Matt Dragoneaux the Vigilante,” he said. “At my right is my battle partner George O’Hussey. To my left is the holo of my ship’s AI, Mata Hari. She is a formidable AI who feels emotions.”
“Emotions?” muttered an older man leaning against a far wall, dressed only in underwear.
“Yes,” Mata Hari said, moving forward
as her holo image changed to the white Victorian dress of her spy persona. “We are here to rescue you all. To take you back to Morrigan. All of you and all of the children,” she said with a tender smile.
“I’m Brigida,” said the middle-aged woman as she leaned against the younger man. “This is my son Brocault. We were kidnapped three days ago from—
”
“From the village of
Rathfriland,” George interrupted with his Irish brogue. “Be assured milady, we will soon head for Lisdoonvarna to return you to your families and to seek a place of refuge for 151 other humans now aboard our starship. They used to work on the gaming world of Omega. But we were
not
Owners!”
George’s Irish accent, so similar to that of Brigida and the older man, had brought hopeful expressions from everyone. His statement of where they came from brought shrugs from most.
“Sir, Freeman Dragoneaux, where are we?” asked Brigida’s son Brocault.
Matt smiled, began to gesture before he realized how both hands dripped blood, then gave a mental shrug. “Out beyond the orbit of Beag. We were incoming from the heliopause when we heard the kidnap broadcast from Morrigan and detected the harvester starship. We pretended to be an Anarchate vessel, and that led us to
board and rescue you. My AI Mata Hari controls ship systems now.”
“Will you also rescue
him
?” asked Brigida, saying the word with a sour expression.
“Him? Who is him?” Matt asked.
“The Captain. O’Toole. He’s human too,” she said with disgust on her face.
Matt
PET image-thought a query to Mata Hari, received an infrared image of the forward compartment with two humans in it, a young woman and a middle-aged man, based on the ship’s crude sensor. The room’s slidedoor was locked and the man had pushed furniture up against it. One arm was linked to the neck of the female, as much as Matt could tell from the glow of the infrared images. He focused on the pale white face of Brigida.
“Who is the young woman with him?”
“Can you see them?” she cried, her voice sounding in great need of water.
“George, offer her a drink from your suit feeder tube. And Brigida, no, I cannot see them the same way I see you. I see only an infrared image of the woman and a man holding her. They are both alive. Who are they?”
Brigida pushed a sweaty blond lock out of her eyes, sighed, then grimaced. “O’Toole used to be the provincial IT manager. Before he ran for office to be the regional Taich. He lost. Shortly after that he disappeared from his job and from Morrigan. That was six months ago. He . . . he led the raid on our village. He knew of it from official visits. None of us voted for him. He was a self-absorbed man then.”
“The woman?” Matt asked, though he had a feeling what the answer would be.
“My daughter Maeve. She’s seventeen. O’Toole took her from here with a promise of food and water if she cooperated.” The woman sipped from George’s feeder tube, gestured to the crowd of other thirsty people behind her, then met Matt’s eyes. “He wanted her when he was a politician. I’m sure he has . . . assaulted her often these last two days.”
Memory pain welled up again in Matt. And the thought that a
human
would be leading this genome harvester raid brought back his cloneslave decanting memories. This wasn’t a case of greed, like the Omega Owners who owned people but let them live a life with some choices. This man had committed treason to humanity. Matt noticed Mata Hari and George both looking his way.
“Mata Hari, will you and George
escort these captives to
Ariadne
? After you secure lock the other six alien crew inside the rooms where they now reside?” A mental check of the ship’s status and placement of lifeforms confirmed that only the six dead hallway aliens and the Brokeet greeter ant had been outside at the time of his boarding. With Mata Hari in control of all ship systems through her complink, it should be safe to transfer the captives. Anyway, George had recovered his laser handgun and could handle any alien surprises, with Mata Hari in his company while also being in Matt’s mind via neurolink. He looked at Brigida and her son Brocault.
“Brigida, I leave now to rescue your
Maeve. You will no longer see this O’Toole. Nor will anyone else ever see him alive again.” He turned to head for the hallway, his gloved fingers twisting as if he were already strangling O’Toole.
“Mr. Vigilante,” called a red-haired man who had helped a nearby woman get a sip of water from George’s feeder tube.
“Yes?” he said, looking over his shoulder as Mata Hari and George moved to help the captives drink, stand up, gather some clothing, link children with family, and prepare for the long walk to the forward airlock.
“Thank you,” the middle-aged man said, looking down as a four year-old boy hugged his leg. The boy also had red hair. “For my son. For my village companions. For rescuing all of us. We knew what awaited us when the genome slavers reached a safe harbor. Some of us might have died by our own hand, except we knew the aliens would just extract living cells for their dirty clone business.”
The man, whose voice faded at the end from obvious exhaustion, hugged the boy close to him, tears rolling down his cheeks. Matt understood about memory pain tears.
“You are welcome. And now, I must see to the last of this dirty business.”
Maeve O’Grady shivered as she sat beside Conand O’Toole. The slaver and former IT manager for Connacht province. The man’s cold hand held her neck in a tight grip, even as the slaver looked at the pile of furniture that lay against the slidedoor. She inhaled deeply, ignoring the sweat and underarm stink of the man who had raped her three times in the last two days. She had just come from a shower in his toilet alcove when the ship shifted slightly from an outside contact, O’Toole had cursed loudly, then had begun piling furniture against the door.
“What are you afraid of, O’Toole?”
“Bitch, shut up!” The hand tightened on Maeve’s neck.
But hope had sprung anew in her as this deadly captain of a genome slaver ship began to show fear, anxiousness and even stopped his cursing as the wallscreen stayed blank, no one answered his demands for information, and the lights stayed on despite his order to Engineering to cut inside ecofields. The grav plates held them both to the floor and the pale orange light preferred by the man’s alien crew stayed on. Short of smashing the ceiling tube, O’Toole had control only of her. And that for not much longer, she hoped, remembering her mother and brother’s desperate hope as O’Toole took her from the cargohold. All three of them knew that the only hope Maeve had of living some kind of future life lay in the hands of the human captain. A man who had already betrayed humanity by leading the raid on her village.
“Lost control of your ship, have you?” she teased O’Toole, not minding if he hit her. Anything was better than another session of forced sex.
O’Toole gritted his teeth. “Damned Anarchate! I paid them their quarterly taxes! Why aren’t they stopping this boarding!” He squeezed her neck hard.
Boarding? By someone O’Toole feared? Better and better. Maybe she could distract him in a way that would help whomever was boarding this ship. “Is it the corvette from Morrigan? Are they the ones you fear?”
“Shut the fuck up!”
O’Toole slammed her head against the metal wall behind the bed on which they both sat. She blinked at the pain. The man reached left with his free hand to grip a long, saw-bladed knife. Twisting in front of her eyes, he grinned under a three day growth of brown beard. “Maybe I should just kill you now? That way the boarders won’t get you!”
“Go ahead,” she said defiantly. “That will only make them mad and make it harder for you to strike a deal for your escape. Right?”
“
Blammm!
” sounded the slidedoor as something heavy hit it from the outside, bending its metal toward them.
O’Toole let go of her neck, shifted the knife to his right hand, then lowered his right hand behind her back. She felt the prick of the knife’s point against her right kidney area. “You are a better hostage alive than dead. For now. So shut up. I will do the talking. You talk, you die. Understood!”
“Understood,” Maeve said.
Metal screeched as three armored fingers appeared in the gap between the door’s top and the metal wall. Then the slidedoor began to bend outward, into the hallway. Soon, a second armored hand joined the first and with a “
Wingggg!
” the slidedoor left its slot to go flying somewhere down the hallway. She saw a tall man wearing a white combat suit studded with devices and a laser cannon on each shoulder, who now filled the doorway. The suit’s faceplate cleared and she saw the face of a reddish-brown skinned man whose features suggested someone from the south of ancient France. But the expression on the man’s face as he focused on O’Toole was something she had never seen. Perhaps an ancient saber-tooth tiger had looked that way when attacking its prey.
“O’Toole, I’m coming for you,” the man’s outside speaker rumbled, carrying a colonial accent she had never before heard.
“You, you pirate! You hurt me and—”
“
Crump!
” went the lightweight furniture as the combat suited man smashed downward with one armored arm. Most of the blocking debris smashed against the metal of the hallway wall behind the man. He kicked aside a few pieces and stepped into the room, the lights on his chest plate flickering wildly as a group of tubes stuck to each bicep tilted toward her and O’Toole, ready to disgorge something.
“Stop!” O’Toole yelled, his voice ragged sounding. “You harm me, she dies!”
The seven foot tall man stopped just inside the room, his bulky presence feeling like a force of nature. But this force lay just three meters away from Maeve and O’Toole. Maeve gave thanks the giant man was angry at O’Toole, not her. She thought most people who now saw the man’s expression would have tried to run away, to anyplace other than this spot. Judgment for O’Toole stood before them. And Maeve did not care if she died suddenly. Seeing the fear in O’Toole’s face and the shivering of his arm against her back was the most delicious feeling she’d felt since being kidnapped and raped.
Matt blinked on his pulse-Doppler radar, taking a scan of the two humans before him.
Three meters away
, Suit told him via his inbuilt PET sensors.
Microwave sensors displayed clearly the skeletal structure of both humans. A subsidiary readout confirmed it as calcium-based, but with a titanium upgrade for strength in the man. Infrared bio-sensors showed a normal body temp for both humans. Pulse-Doppler said each person had normal internal organs. Gas spectrometers documented the exact amount of carbon dioxide both exhaled, with the man breathing fast and heavy. The heatmap glowed with thermal concentrations—at the heads, chests, each heart, four hands, both groins, and both pairs of feet. Blinking the millimeter wavelength radar to penetrate the girl, Matt saw the outline of the metal knife that O’Toole held to the back of Maeve. Mech sensors showed that was the only weapon in the cabin.
The nanoBeads that had followed him into the cabin spread out. They told him that O’Toole was badly frightened, and that he had raped the girl not long ago, according to pheromone levels.